Peer assessment
Great presentation by Steve Joordans on peer assessment, a brilliant pedagogical strategy born out of necessity. He teaches a course on introduction to psychology with 1500 students. His solution to the problem of delivering lectures was to deliver them live to whoeer turned up, uually around 200, with a videocast live to others, and the videocast is then archived so students can watch it later if they wish. He has anecdotes of students watching the videos with their families and then discussing them over meals. Assessment is a problem in its own right, and he tried peer assessment as a means of distributing the burden. Students submit their own work and then receive up to 6 randomly allocated and anonymous submissions from their peers. H ehad various graphs to demonstrate that the grades awarded by students were easily close enough to those awarded by faculty staff to pass muster. He alo said he gets students to grade their own work when they submit. These grades tend to be optimistic by 15%. They then regrade their own work after going through the exercise of grading other students’ work, and the discrepancy is then cut by half. In addition during the process the students learn a great deal about the course and the content, and about learning. Som every interesting stuff there indeed.
July 13th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
Lots of stuff thrown up by Google on this including a union dispute about getting students to work for free. It looks a nice system.
There are several Web based peer assessment tools around including one offered by JISC
July 13th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
This was definitely the most interesting presentation of the conference for me. (Although all the presentations in the invited session ‘Creating On line Communities to Support Distance Leaning’ were also very interesting.
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Many years ago, when I was a computer programmer, we had a system of inspecting each other’s programs at each stage – design, code, test plan. The aim was to produce quality code and spotting errors early in the development cycle cuts down development time. Seeing how others went about doing something was very informative for my own practice and it’s something that has stayed with me over the years. So when watching someone give a Powerpoint presentation I’m always thinking about what works well in the presentation and what doesn’t so that, hopefully, my own presentations will be of a higher standard.
Steve Joorden’s peerScholar is introducing students to this approach. It gives them the chance to see how other students have approached a topic differently and so gives them insights into the topic that they might not otherwise get. There is a short time scale with students getting marked work back within the week as each student only has to mark 5 assignments compared to when teaching assistants mark far greater numbers. You have commented on the only negative aspect of PeerScholar, Steve, the problems that they are having with the Teaching Assistants union who see themselves being potentially put out of a job if peerScholar is extended . Currently it is used for 2 assignments on a first level psychology course and accounts for just 10% of the marks. The other 90% of marks come from multiple choice. Previously the whole 100% came from the multiple choice so the Teaching Assistants are not losing out at the moment but I think they can see the dark clouds on the horizon, rather like me here in Orlando. Although these dark clouds are likely to delay the shuttle launch (again!) and my flight back to a cooler UK
July 14th, 2009 at 9:52 pm
Well, the last sentence was correct. The shuttle launch was put off, yet again. A large group assembled on the eastern side of the departure lounge to get a good view of the launch but it was not to be – cancelled 10 minutes before scheduled lift-off time due to bad weather. Virgin flight 16 was delayed and arrived at a very wet Gatwick around 30 minutes late.