The challenge of measuring and improving teamwork competencies in business education is significant, as highlighted by CSULB College of Business’s recent assessment findings. While many of their core business competencies met benchmarks, team and interpersonal skills fell short of the 80% performance target. This gap underscores the need for teaching methods that improve collaboration skills and tools that can effectively measure these outcomes.
The Value of Peer Feedback in Teamwork
Peer feedback can identify individual student performance within a team but is time consuming to do regularly and it is not practical to manually prepare detailed performance reports for students’ review at scale. Feedback Loop provides a solution to assurance of learning in teamwork, even in large courses: concrete metrics and continuous assessment of team performance. Ongoing, or continuous, peer feedback offers students many opportunities to improve upon their work within their team, unlike traditional end-of-semester evaluations. By making peer feedback easy to conduct, Feedback Loop enables instructors to do peer feedback throughout the term while the automated student performance reports empower students to learn from their peer feedback. This continuous assessment has two benefits:
- Allowing instructors to identify struggling students early and intervene before the teamwork projects conclude.
- Students get the opportunity to reflect on and learn from their performance within their teams, as quantified by the peer feedback they receive.
Measuring Individual Learning Outcomes in Teamwork: AACSB’s Standards
The challenge of measuring “soft” interpersonal skills becomes manageable through structured peer evaluations. Team members rate each other on specific competencies, with common ones being:
- Meeting participation and preparation
- Quality of contributions
- Overall professionalism and reliability
- Collaborative problem-solving
By addressing individual performance within a team, peer feedback surveys provide a direct measurement of students’ teamwork performance, including soft skills. Making peer feedback easy for the instructor to issue and easy for the student to complete, is critical to consistently measure the impact of teamwork across the curriculum.
Normally, assessment of group projects would also be considered an indirect measure where performance cannot be attributed to a specific individual, but rather only to the group as a whole. However, if the group assignment can provide for assessment of competency at the individual level, a group assignment could be assessed directly with a rubric.
–AACSB 2020 Guiding Principles and Standards for Business Accreditation, page 45.
Building Better Team Contributors
Beyond measurement, ongoing peer feedback is a learning opportunity. Results can be published to students (typically anonymously) to learn from and can contribute to students developing self-awareness and improved collaboration skills. Providing students with feedback directly from their peers enhances accountability among student teams and improved self awareness. Students also necessarily get an excercise in giving feedback, a common practice in careers in itself.
The Path Forward for business schools working to strengthen team skills assessment is to use a peer feedback platform, like Feedback Loop, for a scalable solution to measuring and improving this critical competency. By implementing continuous peer feedback, business schools can better prepare students for the collaborative demands of today’s workplace demonstrate meeting AACSB’s accreditation standards relating to teamwork.
