Competency matrices for peer assessment of individuals in team projects

Assessing individual contributions on team projects and promoting the maturation of team knowledge skills in students is difficult. Traditional assessment tools score an individual over a set of categories that are loosely defined and lack well-defined expectations. Further, for curriculum in which team-based learning is a primary component, the traditional approach to assessment fails to provide visibility to the students as to how their team-knowledge skills should mature as they progress. In this paper we present a competency matrix based approach that defines expected performance for required team knowledge skills, where assessment is performed relative to the expectations for the current level of the student. This competency matrix not only provides guidance and clarification for students learning these skills as they mature in their academic careers but also provides a foundation for self and peer assessments. A comparison survey was distributed to students at various levels within the curriculum currently using a traditional assessment instrument. While the students recognized that the competency-based approach was more involved and time consuming, the results of that survey demonstrate that students have a stronger preference for the competency matrix approach. We also include a discussion of the benefits and difficulties associated with this model and future work.