Uniy VI - How do we assess collaborative problem solving?

My personal experience centers on pre-K to elementary/middle and in that level, I would definitely like to stress that individual performance is the most important (and straightforward) way of assessing a student’s understanding. In the context of collaborative learning, the instructor needs to have a clear understanding of each student’s role in a group project to make a fair assessment. Collaborative projects help the class cover a lot of ground in exploring the depth of the subjects since the students in a group can individually pursue their areas of interest and contribute to the project. However, that increases the work on assessment as the instructor has to weigh each individual’s work on a different yardstick based on their specific choice of problem areas. For example, if a few students work together to study a specific problem (e.g. increasing school dropouts in their state) towards proposing a solution then there will be a division of labor in the group. Someone would work on gathering data and interpreting them while someone will try to meaningfully explain the correlation between various data sets and someone else might focus on editing the multiple solutions at hand to create the final presentation. Everyone should be assessed individually based on what they specifically achieved through the course of the project and there should be a reasonable percent of the assessment based on the final product. That would be fair in my opinion to grade individual contributions as well as to measure their effectiveness while working in a team.