Assessment Tools for Students’ Group and Teamwork in Higher Education: A Systematic Literature Review

Teamwork is an essential part of professional life and cooperation skills are necessary for students for successful employment. The main task of higher education is to increase the competitiveness of graduates in the job market by creating educational programs aimed at teamwork skills development. A reliable measurement method is needed to observe progress of these skills. That is why assessment tools for students’ teamwork development play an important role in higher education. The review reveals key issues and contradictions in the assessment of group and team work in higher education. By analyzing traditional methods (expert assessment, peer assessment, normalized approaches) the study demonstrates their possible vulnerability to subjectivity, cognitive biases and social factors. Meanwhile automated algorithms, digital trace analysis and multimodal learning analytics have high potential to capture students’ real contributions and the dynamics of their interactions. However, these technologies are still poorly understood and represented in the scientific literature on group and teamwork and their perception by students remains ambiguous. One of the key findings of the study is that most existing approaches evaluate only the final result, ignoring the process of developing team skills and the changing roles of participants over time, and this limitation leads to unfair distribution of grades and decreased student motivation. The paperwork emphasizes the need to move to hybrid assessment models that combine quantitative digital data with high-quality pedagogical expertise. The presented findings are based on an analysis of 43 empirical studies and show that the future of team assessment lies in the integration of digital technologies that can keep a close watch on student interactions in real time, identify patterns of collaboration and ensure fair grade distribution.

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