Some of this is covered in other resources within 'Canvas Help for Staff' or guidance from CIE or IT. Here's a summary:

There are a couple of ways you can filter the Grades area or SpeedGrader to only show you the students that correspond to a group.

Both of these rely upon groups already being set up in your course. So in the People area of the course you will already have a 'group set' (i.e. category of group for example 'Seminar Groups') and then inside of this a range of groups (ideally with unique name 'ECON101-Group 1' etc.), and you will have students arranged in groups. If you have not done this then please look at other resources for instructions including how to organise groups in bulk from a spreadsheet. If you already have groups set up, then the hard work is done!

Option 1: Filtering just the Grades area:

With groups in place, within the Grades area you can click on the View button> choose Filters> Student Groups. A Group selection drop-down appears on the right-hand side from which you can choose a group and it reduces the Grades area to just show you the students relevant to the group and their grades. This view preference is individual to each instructor on the course (so if you are supporting colleagues you may need to instruct them on how to do the same).

Screenshot image showing the Grades area of Canvas, the location of the View control, and the Group selection drop-down. The overall image shows the final result with a reduced table of grades relating to only those students within the group.

If you needed to see a submission in SpeedGrader from a specific student, then click on the submission symbol relating the student (icon looks below like a paper with an exclamation mark) and then click on the right-pointing arrow. Then click on SpeedGrader from the panel that floats in from the right. This option is not available to you whilst 'anonymous grading' is turned on for an assignment.

Screenshot image showing the route through from the Grades area to a specific assignment submission from a student. A link is highlighted for the user to press, this brings in a link to SpeedGrader that floats in from the right-hand side of the screen.

This opens SpeedGrader directly at the specific submission, but you may notice that the loading/process is a bit slow, and it does not filter SpeedGrader to only show you submissions from students in the group. An alternative is to use the 'Filter SpeedGrader by Groups' setting as Option 2 below.

Option 2: Filter SpeedGrader by Groups

This is a little bit trickier to setup and administer but can make marking very easy for where there are a large number of markers.

Firstly you need to enable a course-wide setting. Instructions are here: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-enable-SpeedGrader-to-launch-filtered-by-student-group/ta-p/947

Then when you try to launch SpeedGrader (say from the Assignment screen) you will first be asked to select a group from the menu on the right before SpeedGrader will launch.

This will launch SpeedGrader for the assignment, but only show you the submissions from students that belong to the group. This gives advantages such as for navigating through submissions via the Previous and Next buttons, or for use for dividing marking or assignment moderation.

If you are looking to launch SpeedGrader for an assignment from the Grades area (for example to grade quiz submissions), if you launch SpeedGrader here without first selecting a group, SpeedGrader will display a green pop-up message such as "The group "[Group Name]" was automatically selected because no group was previously chosen. You can change the selected group in the Gradebook." What this means is that Canvas wants you to select a group first within the Grades area: follow the instruction in Option 1 above.

One caveat is that this setting can become very annoying: it applies the filter to all other assignments in the course whether it is needed or not. It also has repercussions when moving from the Grades area to SpeedGrader. So our advice so far to module leaders has been to expect to use this setting temporarily and to communicate to fellow instructors/graders about the feature and any changes they may experience.

Some of these approaches can seem a little complex, especially as we are learning to use Canvas and seek to establish practices. If you or your department would like advice your assessment processes please do check with your school office for any locally established approaches, and feel free to reach out to CIE (cie@liverpool.ac.uk) for further advice.