Rationale
Beyond my teaching philosopy of providing a clear, fair and transparent assessment criteria for all coursework and assessment, a number of specific issues provided the rationale for this intervention:
- Students were expressing specific feedback that they were unsure as to what the assessment criteria were and how feedback and grades related to clearly these.
- Copies of all final (4th and 5th) year course work must be kept by Department for review by the external examiners. This resulted in students being able to see coursework for only a limited period and not able to review feedback at times when requried – e.g. not at exam time.
- Academics do not generally keep a copy of the submission and was unable to refer to previous feedback provided if further feedback was requested by students.
- Students did not often refer to previous coursework assessments and feedback when producing the next assessment.
The development, availability and integration of online feedback and assessment tools (such as TURNITIN) into MyPlace offered an opportunity to address the factors above.
Successes
Specific success are:
- Student feedback was very positive on clarity of assessment criteria and relevance of both general and specific feedback. The also appreciated keeping copies of feedback for timely use.
- The quantity of hard copy marking material was significantly reduced, along with the environmental benefits of less paper use.
- Marking could be achieved anywhere with access to the internet (usually my iPad on the train). Backing up to the servers must be regular but this is done automatically.
Other coleagues have observed success of this and broader across the department has begun.
Lessons Learnt
Specific lessons include:
- Show the students where the information is, how to access it and what to do with it. Use the “student view” options to get their viewpoint across. Never assume they know where the information is and what is means.
- Check the connectivity of all systems before opening to students
- Be aware of software updates/changes and never assume because it worked last year, it will this year!
Challenges
Challenges still arise from student invovlement and engagement. A level of familiarity with the software/technologies is required and some students are not as experienced as others. A solution is to run demonstration/training during lectures and to make help guides available on my place. A particular issue still arises from students not engaging with the information provided in advance and in reading feedback afterwards – this can be monitored via the online tools but you cannot compel the student to access the information with tools! There is a requirement to motivate students to do this.
There are a number of technical issues that arose during each year (particualrly in terms of “how do I do this now on MyPlace” following software upgrades…). The first and immediate port of call should be the Learning Technologies Team (Alistair Campbell ext 3770).
Scalability
This can be applied to any course where there are coursework submissions. Given the broad range of software types that now interface with these tools, virtually any submission type can be assessed.
Class sizes this was applied to were typically around 100 students. The benefits of more flexible marking were immediate.
Suggestions for Transferability
I would wholly recommend using this approach to feedback and assessment. It is transferable, the only limiting factor is the confidence of the academic to embrace the tools!
Attachments
N/AGroup work is an opportunity for the students to learn to work as a team. To be successful in this, the students need to reflect on how they contribute to the group progress. Their perception of their own performance might sometimes by different from that of their peers. The peer evaluation was performed half-way through the project so that the students could modify their behaviour, if they thought it was necessary after reading the peers’ comments. The peers’ feedback and comments were available also to the supervisor, so s/he could find out if there were any issues that needed to be resolved within the group.
Successes
The students liked to be able to have a say on how the other group members were performing, and they also liked to receive constructive criticism. The students have commented that they have tried to improve their performance after they received the feedback, and in most cases, they agreed with the comments received.
The staff thought that the students carried out this activity in a very mature and professional way, and they thought that it was a valuable experience for the students. The staff also used the peers’ evaluation as a check of their own impressions of how the individual students were performing in the group.
Lessons Learnt
It is advisable for the staff to read and possibly edit the feedback comments before releasing them to the students. The experience was very positive, but it was time consuming for the staff to collate the students’ comments. I am looking into automating the submissions and circulation of peer assessement scores and comments, using WebPA and MyPlace.
The same peer evaluation exercise could be repeated at the end of the project, and could be used to assign a certain portion of the final mark to give a more fair and accurate grade that includes groupwork collaboration.
Challenges
The aim and importance of this activity must be made clear to the students, so they can use is effectively. As said above, it is time consuming for the staff to collate the students’ comments, and this needs to be automated to implement the initiative successfully.
Scalability
This activity can be used for large class sizes, as long as the peers’ marks and comments are uploaded and collated automatically.
Suggestions for Transferability
This initiative can be used in any group work activity.
Attachments
The peer evaluation form used can be found in :“Toward Fairness in Assessing Student Groupwork: A Protocol for Peer Evaluation of Individual Contributions” Martin Fellenz (Journal of Management Education; August 2006 vol. 30 no. 4 570-591) (attached to the email)
Files attached: “Group peer evaluation form”, “Peer assessment supervisors”
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