Assessing Self & Peers
Groupwork facilitates peer learning and encourages students to develop collaborative skills, a crucial graduate attribute.
Self and peer assessment is a valuable tool for promoting these outcomes while overcoming potential inequities of equal marks for unequal contributions:
- Group members can be responsible for negotiating and managing the balance of contributions and then assessing whether the balance has been achieved using self and peer assessment.
- Group members can be rewarded when they have made an excellent contribution that is over-and-above what the team expected as an average effort for a team member can be rewarded for doing so.
- Group members who have not contributed to the same extent can have their contribution appropriately reflected in an adjusted mark.
Self assessment
What is self assessment?
Self assessment involves students identifying standards and/or criteria to apply to their work and making judgments about the extent to which they have met these criteria and standards.
Self assessment requires students to
- take responsibility for monitoring and making judgments about their work,
- think critically about what they are learning, and
- identify appropriate standards of performance and apply them to their own work.
Self assessment criteria
Some students are more skilled at being self-reflective, others need opportunities to learn these skills that are essential for effective learning.
Peer assessment
Peer assessment involves members of a group making evaluative judgments regarding the performance of the group as a whole, in addition to the performance of individual members of a group. Peer assessment can be used for both formative and summative purposes. Summative assessment always affects marks and therefore grades. Formative assessment occurs during the completion of the task to provide feedback to guide improvements. Formative assessment may or may not have any effect on marks. It is a good idea to conduct formative assessment several times during the semester (eg. 1/3 and 2/3 of the course).
View this useful guide on giving and receiving feedback in peer and self-assessment.
Formative peer assessment is used:
- to help students assess their progress on achieving the group task
- to assess the success of their group's interactions and processes
- to encourage group members to consider how they might improve group performance and the performance of individual contributions
- to allow staff to monitor that groups are progressing appropriately and members are making a fair contribution and to guide corrective action if necessary
You could use
- an informal watchful eye approach if you have groups regularly doing some of their work in-class because it is easier to monitor group performance and member contributions less formally. Informal suggestions for improvements can be made
- these criteria and this form to undertake a peer assessment in groups at any time
- when groupwork is done out of class, take 15 minutes in class so that groups can first reflect on their group performance and then write a one-page group report. The report could ask groups to summarise the best 5 things about their group, the 5 things most in need of improvement and 5 strategies in order of importance that they intend to follow for the remainder of the groupwork task. It is useful to flag to students that giving and receiving feedback is an important skill to learn. Even groups performing well can learn what they can do better
- an invitation to individuals or groups to make a appointment with you if they perceive that their group is dysfunctional.
- anonymous feedback from students who fill out peer evaluation forms with ‘appreciations’ and ‘requests’ for each of their team-mates. Then after you collate their feedback, provide it anonymously to each individual student in an email.
- motivation with marks by explaining to students at the beginning of semester that preparation and participation might affect the final mark, especially if their result is a borderline mark (e.g. almost a pass/credit/etc.).
Summative peer assessment is used:
- typically at the end of a group assessment but may also be used during
- more formally than formative peer assessment in its purist form because it affects marks
- to either moderate the final group mark allocated to individual group members or as a component of assessment that is in addition to the group mark.
Examples
Examples of peer assessment in the Faculty and from elsewhere.
Great example of peer assessment from California State University
Also a sample test for measuring teamwork capabilities developed by Dr. Michael J. Stevens and Dr. Michael A. Campion.
Another good strategy for non-mathematical peer evaluation suggested by Michael Sweet from University of Texas
Great example and description of using un-equal peer marks by Andrew Finn from George Mason University in Virginia
Web-based self and peer assessment
SPARK
An example under development and soon to be released after trials at the University of Sydney is SPARK which:
- enables students to fairly rate contributions across a range of criteria related to team tasks and team process and thus fairly acknowledge individuals' contributions.
- enables confidentiality in the rating process of your own and your peers' contributions since it can be done online (and even multiple times if necessary).
- automates data collection, collation and calculation issues that would otherwise make self and peer assessment too difficult.
A 12 point Step-by-Step guide to SPARK for academics
An explanation for students of how SPARK works
SPARK briefing kit (Flash player required to view)
Facilitating formative feedback in-class discussion
Calibrated Peer Review
Calibrated Peer Review (CPR)™ is a Web-based program that enables frequent writing assignments even in large classes with limited instructional resources. In fact, CPR can reduce the time an instructor now spends reading and assessing student writing.
CPR offers instructors the choice of creating their own writing assignments or using the rapidly expanding assignment library. Although CPR stems from a science-based model, CPR has the exciting feature that it is discipline independent and level independent.
University of California, (2001). ‘Introduction to CPR’