Students were reluctant to criticize team members
during their presentations as required by the grading
matrix and limited their team critiques to reports of
scheduling conflicts. This was inconsistent with their
interim team functioning assessments that reported
challenges with team members who failed to attend
meetings or to participate in a substantial way.
Although peer evaluation is important to team
functioning, it is a difficult skill, and it may be
inappropriate to ask students to do this as part of a
graded presentation. In the future, the team critique
will be eliminated from the presentations, and students
will instead be asked to report on what they
learned from the team experience. The anonymous
interim team assessments will continue to be used but
will be used by faculty to identify and intervene with
teams experiencing difficulties.