It probably requires a shift in what we think of as assessment. Montessori has some ideas:

http://montessoriguide.org/assessment/

Seems to produce good results:

http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/04/05/the-montessori-...

What would be the point of assessing an isolated individual in a world of collaboration?

Its akin to evaluating how someone would do something in the middle of the jungle without tools or support. Sure, you will be able to know who does better in that setting, but what conclusion can you bring of that?

It's gonna kinda suck to be the engineering team where nobody actually learned calculus.

Or the surgical team where everyone "collaborated" on basic anatomy.

How would you know nobody learned calculus?

You are comparing people that dont know to people that know with that allegory. In a collaborative setting you would be able to see what people build, teach each other, and learn.

A team with 5 people that know 20% calculus can produce much better results than a team where 1 person knows 100%. And sometimes they wouldnt be able to produce a result at all.

> but what conclusion can you bring of that

Welllll you could conclude that they are in a prime position to create a YouTube channel with 178 million views /s

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA/abo...

>>What would be the point of assessing an isolated individual in a world of collaboration?

Collaboration can only occur when each party has something meaningful to contribute.

Yes, you're absolutely right, that someone's effectiveness -- in academia or otherwise -- depends on those around them.

But you still have to distinguish those who are not effective at all, contributing nothing, but who are still putting their name on the project.

To use the sibling example, there's a difference between a surgeon who draws on other specialists in the operation, vs someone that knows nothing about surgery.

> But you still have to distinguish those who are not effective at all, contributing nothing, but who are still putting their name on the project.

You dont need an individual assessment to do that. The real work world is exemplary on that. People without degrees very often outrank and outperform people with degrees, either through curiosity or through other skills that make him a more important key member.

In real life if someone is regarded as unproductive by his co-workers is not re-tested individually for validation.

Both collaborative assignments and assessments of those assignments are often poorly conceptualized in school.

Why, for example, do curriculum developers create (or choose to adopt from textbook publishers) scenarios where if one person fails, everybody in the group suffers? That's not why we collaborate. In fact, that's the opposite of why we collaborate. We don't do it to create multiple points of failure.

It's also a problem with the way we assess and the fact that we almost exclusively conduct summative assessments on these types of projects with high-stakes consequences rather than formative assessments that allow the experience to be used to foster understanding.

I'm a parent (and an education journalist). I see a lot of this. My daughter has had to do the entire work for several "collaborative" projects to maintain her GPA just because the other students wouldn't do the work or wouldn't do it well. That's a common complaint.

Two ideas for getting around that:

1. For the types of assignments where a small group produces a single outcome and shares responsibility for it, assess formatively. If the group does poorly, the teacher sits down with them and gives them supplemental instruction. And, in talking to the students, that teacher can also discover where the weaker students are and focus on them. That way you get assessment with zero high-stakes consequences, and you help advance learning rather than ending it with a letter grade.

2. Assign projects where each student has a job and is evaluated singularly for that job but is allowed to work collaboratively with other students (and the teacher) to complete it. There are all kinds of ways to encourage collaboration in those cases without resorting to punishing others for one person's failure in the end product of a collaborative assignment.

As others have said, there's also the question of assessment itself. Why assess for a grade or points or what have you? There's a movement to do away with grades and test scores. It's working fairly well, but it requires serious dedication from the teacher to ensure that students are learning. Large-scale, that's difficult. We don't have 4 million+ teachers who would be willing to do that extra work.

In University for me at least, a lot of those collaborative projects allowed the students to distribute their grade amongst participants.

In my experience at least the weaker contributors to the groups success, even those that just coasted, were still very honest when asked to assess their contribution and the contribution of others.

In my university we often had group projects and at the end of the project you scored your team members. If the entire team scored one member highly or poorly, their grade could be weighted higher or lower.

Furthermore, how do we ascertain whether or not group work is just "outsourcing" for teachers and the students that learned the concept aren't simply k-12 unpaid TAs who find their role as "assistant professor" pretty tedious thus turning off the best and brightest from a lifetime of enriching educational experiences?

Actually you can learn a lot from teaching others or helping others learn the material. When you have to teach someone else something you learn what you don't actually know that well.