e-assessment (f)or learning

Yesterday morning I particated in a wonderful webinar on Peerwise (http://peerwise.cs.auckland.ac.nz/), led by Paul Denny from the University of Auckland. The more I see of it, the more I am impressed by Peerwise – yesterday I attempted to write questions for myself for the first time, and also reviewed other people’s questions. It was tremendous fun and we all agreed that students would be likely to learn by authoring questions and attempting and reviewing other students’ questions.

Someone asked Paul if has plans to add question types other than multiple choice (the answer is yes, but not many). However this led to an interesting point – Paul explained that for student authoring of questions, multiple choice is good, because they have to think about the distractors. He could be right!

Also at the ‘More effective assessment and feedback’ meeting on Wednesday, Simon Bates spoke about the use of ‘Peerwise’ at the University of Edinburgh. Peerwise (see http://peerwise.cs.auckland.ac.nz/) enables students to write their own assessment questions, and to share and discus them with their colleagues. Physics students at Edinburgh have written some excellent and imaginative questions. Simon rightly described the work as exciting and typically of the Edinburgh Physics Education Research Group, they are trying to evaluate its impact.  So far they have found that students who engage with Peerwise are likely to do better than those who don’t . This is hardly surprising – better motivated students are likely both to engage with Peerwise and to do better. More surprising is the fact that students at all levels seem to benefit – it’s not just the best or the weakest. Most students also seem to like Peerwise.

I was excited and intrigued by Simon’s talk and look forward to hearing more. I can see that writing your own e-assessment questions will be a fun and motivating experience for students. But how much do they really learn in doing this? Is it really assessment? I’m not sure.