Dr Anna Chatzimichali
“If there’s a student with a disability in the team, that team is more engaged with the design task. But when their peers mark each other, they tend to get a slightly lower mark”
Dr Anna Chatzimichali, EDI+ Fellow, the University of Bath
Engineering design studios are often considered spaces that encourage diverse perspectives and active participation. However, the social and interpersonal demands of group project work may create additional barriers for some students, particularly those with disabilities or other learning support needs. In design studios, students work together on an open-ended problem that no one person could solve alone. At the end of the unit, each team receives a single mark, which students can adjust based on their own contributions and those of their teammates. A few percentage points may move up or down depending on how students judge each person’s contribution.
But the final mark captures only part of what happened. It reflects the outcome, not necessarily the less visible work that kept the team functioning: keeping people involved, maintaining communication or steering the group back on course when it began to drift.
Dr Anna Chatzimichali, Senior Lecturer in Engineering Design at the University of Bath, had noticed this pattern in her own studios for some time. Her research examines how people think and behave during the design process, but the question that drove her EDI+ Fellowship grew directly from her teaching. When a team ran into difficulty, the students involved were often those with a disability access plan, Bath’s formal record of the adjustments agreed for someone with a particular condition or need. The University stored information about these plans in one system, and students’ marks in another, but almost no one examined the relationship between them.
Looking at teamwork differently
When Dr Chatzimichali compared students’ access plans with their marks, she began to question whether peer moderation itself might be creating a problem. There is no overall disability awarding gap in her department, but that does not necessarily tell the whole story. What happens when you look more closely at individual units and specific pieces of peer-moderated assessment?
She wanted to understand whether having a disabled student in a group affected how the team worked and how its members assessed one another afterwards.
The first challenge was persuading students to take part. Many were cautious about joining the research, and even more were reluctant to disclose a disability, even anonymously. That reluctance became part of the finding. It showed how exposed students can feel when asked to identify a difference they may already be working hard to manage.
High engagement in the group task
Due to the limited uptake in the first year of the Fellowship, Dr Chatzimichali decided to repeat the study the next year. Following ethical approval from the Ethics Committee, 20 teams gave consent to participate in the study and were closely observed as they worked in the design studio. Emma Harrison and Abigail Bradley, both PhD candidates in psychology, helped Dr Chatzimichali develop the observation framework, drawing on their expertise to shape the study’s protocol. The observations suggested that groups which included a student with a disability access plan were less likely to disengage from the task during studio work. These groups were associated with more socially coordinated modes of working, with the strongest evidence for increased communication and reduced observed task division into independent activities.
To Dr Chatzimichali and to everyone who lives with a disability, the pattern is recognisable. It may be associated with the extra effort and energy required to keep things moving, also known as the “invisible labour of disability”.
What troubled her was what happened when those same students were marked by their peers.
“If there’s a student with a disability in the team, that team is more engaged with the design task”, she says, “But when their peers mark each other, they tend to get a slightly lower mark”
In terms of assignment marks, the average group project mark across the cohort was around 66 per cent, while students with a disability access plan scored about seven percentage points lower on average. Six of the 46 students with an access plan failed this part of the unit, compared with six of the 265 students without one. Peer moderation also appeared to affect the two groups differently. It tended to raise the marks of students without a disability slightly and lower those of students with an access plan. Overall, students with an access plan were around one and a half times more likely to have their group mark reduced. However, Dr Chatzimichali is careful not to read too much into the trends in the marks, as the data do not show a statistically significant difference.
What the disability form leaves out
Part of the problem, Dr Chatzimichali believes, is that the system is not set up to see these kinds of patterns. A disability access plan usually reaches teaching staff to convey short adjustments, such as extra time in an exam. It says much less about how to instruct unit convenors on adjusting or navigating work within a team of peers.
She remembers a student from another cohort whose plan noted that they found social situations difficult. But the course required teamwork, partly because of professional accreditation. “We have to throw them in and say, now figure it out by yourselves,” she says. There is no guidance in their plan. “Then, at the end, those same students are asked to judge one another.”
She understands why students value peer moderation. It feels like protection against having to carry more than their share of the work or punishment for those who do not contribute equally. But she questions whether it actually measures what it purports to measure. A peer mark may reflect contribution. It may also reflect confidence, popularity, ease in a group, or the visibility of someone’s work to others.
Designing assessment differently
Dr Chatzimichali is realistic about what one project can show. Even so, she believes the findings point to some practical steps universities could take. When assessing group work, they could compare the marks of students with and without a disability access plan and look more closely at how peer moderation affects each group. Disability services within the organisation could also give staff clearer guidance on supporting students who may find group work more challenging.
Institutions already monitor the overall disability awarding gap. Still, that measure can be too broad to reveal what happens within a single assignment, particularly when students who have worked closely together are asked to reduce one another’s contribution to a number.
For Dr Chatzimichali, engineering design group work and its assessment deserve closer attention. This is especially true in engineering, where the emphasis is often on the outcome. At the same time, questions of fairness, equity and individual contribution can receive more scrutiny.