Improving student attitudes toward group work through embedding skills and assessment

MNG00114 Hospitality Services Management had been rating poorly with students (red-lighted in 2019) with the most common complaint about the group work assignment. Group work is an important aspect of a student's learning experience as it promotes the practice of teamwork and the development of interpersonal competencies (Gottschall, Garc & Bayonas, 2008; Gaudet et al., 2010; Kirschner et al., 2011; Mendo et al., 2016). We decided to redesign the unit based on our observation that students were previously assigned a group work task with little teamwork training. Session 2 included features designed to train and improve student's attitudes and social skills towards group work and to reward their group work performance. This presentation will showcase the results of the renewed curriculum and innovative group work practices. Changes include: early assessment of student attitude toward group work with a standardised instrument; explicitly teaching group communication and group process management; and introducing an individual assessment on the value of group work before the formation of groups. Once in groups, another practice was introduced that allowed students to score more than the total assessment mark through peer evaluation to reward cooperation. This increased flexibility in the scoring of the group work was implemented to address some of the issues that arise when group work is undertaken by students with diverse academic skills. We surveyed the students before the unit and will show survey results after the unit to ascertain the effectiveness of our approach.