Peer Assessment

 This paper describes a student centred approach to engineering analysis as part of the work carried out under The Student-centred Learning In Construction Education (SLICE) project. SLICE is a UK government financed project supported by the Fund for ...

The literature suggests that peer assessment contributes to the development of student learning and promotes ownership of assessment processes. These claims emerge from research conducted primarily inWestern contexts. This exploratory paper reports on the perspectives that a class of Hong Kong primary school students and their teachers have on their engagement with peer assessment. It draws on data collected through extensive interviews and classroom observations from a 2-year case study. The findings indicate that student perceptions about the usefulness of peer assessment follow from their perspectives on quality of peer feedback, peer language proficiency, and the novelty or repetitiveness of its processes. Teachers and students also viewed peer assessment as assuming a wider role in preparing for examinations and future secondary schooling. A key implication is that assessment practices are deeply cultural and, in test-dominated settings, peer assessment may have most potential when explicit links are drawn with preparation for summative assessment.

This research was conducted to determine the opinions of prospective teachers on peer assessment. The study was carried out at a university in the West Black sea with forty-one prospective Turkish teachers. The prospective teachers presented a lesson on a subject they had decided on formerly, and were evaluated by their peers. The groups consisted of five members, and all the members of the class participated in peer assessment alternately. After the completion of peer assessment study, the opinions of prospective teachers were obtained by asking them to answer open-ended questions in written form. For the data obtained, content analysis was carried out. The findings of the study has indicated that peer evaluation is beneficial in providing affective and academic development, use of metacognitive strategies, and in the points of giving feedback. It has been determined that personal characteristics, personal relations, not being competent at peer assessment and the assessment forms' being overloaded with too many criteria have resulted in a couple of problems at application. Prospective teachers have made suggestions considering the role of the teacher, the features of the assessment group, the means of assessment and the assessment form and they have not welcomed the idea of using the peer assessment points as final grades. Within the frame of the findings of the study, the suggestions have been developed on how to construct peer assessment practices.

Sex differences in physical and indirect aggression have been found in many societies but, to our knowledge, have not been studied in a population of hunter-gatherers. Among Aka foragers of the Central African Republic we tested whether males physically aggressed more than females, and whether females indirectly aggressed more than males, as has been seen in other societies. We also tested predictions of an evolutionary theory of physical strength, anger, and physical aggression. We found a large male bias in physical aggression. Controlling for anger, we found an adult female bias in indirect aggression. Physical strength predicted anger, which predicted hitting, although results were sensitive to the inclusion or exclusion of traditional healers, who were physically and emotionally distinct from other Aka. With some important caveats, our results generally support the predicted sex differences in physical aggression and indirect aggression, and the predicted relationships among anger, strength, and aggression.

This presentation was made at the DARIAH Winter School, on the 26th of October 2016, in Prague. It makes a short presentation of various evaluation systems and how the SSH fare into these, then it concentrates on the challenges of the SSH evaluation, amongst which data gathering and interoperability of research information systems. It ends with a few observations about the impact  on evaluation of the trend towards open access.

This paper focuses on an innovative way of teaching and learning inspired by cooperative inquiry. Cooperative inquiry is usually used as an empowering research methodology for participatory transformation and is deeply engaged with the human condition. This paper reports on its modification within a hierarchical tertiary education setting through a process named ‘Academic Co-creative Inquiry’ where teachers and students through

A sample of Chinese children in Shanghai, People’s Republic of China, initially aged 8 and 10 years, participated in this four-year longitudinal project. Information on social functioning including sociability-leadership, aggression-disruption, and shyness-sensitivity was collected from peer assessments in the original study. Data on indexes of social and school adjustment, including peer acceptance, teachers’ perceptions of school-related competence, leadership, academic achievement,

When assessing personality disorder traits, not all judges make equally valid judgments of all targets. The present study uses social network analysis to investigate factors associated with reliability and validity in peer assessment. Participants were groups of military recruits (N= 809) who acted as both targets and judges in a round-robin design. Participants completed self-and informant versions of the Multisource Assessment of Personality Pathology. Social network matrices were constructed based on reported ...

Teamwork and cooperative learning models are based on the premise that learning is best achieved interactively rather than through a one-way transmission process. In this study, the relationship between students' motivational orientation and the quality of learning in collaborative teams is investigated. A self-report measure of student self-efficacy and self- regulation was administered to students working on team-based assessment tasks, and correlated with performance data obtained from classroom assignments. The results showed that motivational beliefs were the best predictor of academic performance.

Self-regulation in medicine depends on accurate self-assessment. The purpose of the present study was to examine the discrepancy between self and peer assessments for a group of specialist physicians from internal medicine (IM), pediatrics, and psychiatry clinical domains (i.e., patient management, clinical assessment, professional development, and communication). Data from 304 psychiatrists, pediatricians and internal medicine specialists were used. Each physician had data from an identical self and 8 peer (38 item/4 clinical domains assessment). A total of 2306 peer assessments were available. Physicians were classified into quartiles based on mean assessment peer data and compared with self-assessment data. The analyses showed that self and peer assessment profiles were consistent across specialties and domains. Physicians assessed in the lowest and highest quartiles (i.e., <25th and >75th) by colleagues tended to rate themselves 30-40 percentile ranks higher and lower than peers, respectively. This study suggests that practicing physicians are inaccurate in assessing their own performance. These data suggest that systems to provide practicing physicians with regular and routine feedback may be appropriate if we are to ensure physicians are able to accurately assess themselves in a profession in which self-regulation is predicated upon the assumption that physicians know their capabilities and limitations.

... All of these repositories were created and are maintained co-operatively by the CBUC and the Centro de Supercomputación de Cataluña (CESCA). Details of them follow. ... Warner, S. (2003), "E-prints and the Open Archives Initiative", Library Hi-Tech, Vol. 21 No.2, pp.140-50. ...

A variety of assessment tasks as good assessment principles have been adopted as common practice in universities in Hong Kong. It is essential for first-year students to receive feedback on how they perform in the tasks as the expectations and standards required in university programmes are markedly different from schools. Students may receive just-in-time feedback from peers when arranged by teaching faculty. This paper reports a case study of first-year students studying 'Garment Manufacture' working on a group project on how individuals provide feedback on peer group performance. The feedback includes qualitative comments with an overall grade. To examine if student judgement over peer group performance matches the standards expected by teaching faculty, the individual grades on each team are totalled and averaged, and compared with the teacher's grade. As students can benefit from qualitative feedback, we examine the quality of feedback from students. All comments ar...

There has been growing demand for continuous improvements in the workplace to meet the needs of the knowledge economy of the twenty-first century in Hong Kong. Full-time employees are being challenged by greater demands on quality and the introduction of new ...

Forty science students received training for 12 weeks on delivering effective presentations and using a tertiary-level English oral presentation scale comprising three subscales (Verbal Communication, Nonverbal Communication, and Content and Organization) measured by 18 items. For their final project, each student was given 10 to 12 min to present on 1 of the 5 compulsory science books for the module and was rated by the tutor, peers, and himself/herself. Many-facet Rasch measurement, correlation, and analysis of variance were performed to mine the data. The results show that the student raters, tutor, items, and rating scales achieved high psychometric quality, though a small number of assessments exhibited bias. Although all of the biased self-assessments were underestimations of presentation skills, the peer and tutor assessment bias had a mixed pattern. In addition, self-, peer, and tutor assessments had low to medium correlations on the subscales, and a significant difference was found between the assessments. Implications are discussed.

Lifelong learning is not simply flavour of the month but standard practice across many industries in Hong Kong. In a working environment where change is ongoing, employees are required to seek continuous updates and to enrich their knowledge and skills if they want to perform effectively at work. However, there are limitations to on-the-job learning, as there can be insufficient expertise, and a learning culture can be lacking in organizations. On-demand learning may be of benefit if employees can experience the synergy of cross-role collaboration in an organization. Organizations may resort to external agents to provide training opportunities.

There has been growing demand for university–industry partnership training schemes, in which an organization adopts a proactive staff development strategy so that employees have the benefit of structured and organized training and learning activities. This can provide opportunities for employees to develop broader knowledge and skills for their jobs despite having different roles and responsibilities in an organization.

This paper reports the benefits and challenges experienced by employees of a well-established apparel buying company in Hong Kong attending a full-time training scheme that has been adopted for two consecutive years. Because the company is expanding and has entered global partnerships, it is essential to ensure that its employees have a global perspective. Participants were selected from different ranks in the company and were expected to develop practical skills and competence in managing global partnerships in the industry. Participants had diverse working backgrounds, and working experience covered a wide range. This paper reports the experiences of participants learning together outside the normal working environment and on how they developed professional skills by scaffolding strengths and talents in group projects and developing evaluative skills through peer-group feedback. As participants were challenged with non-routine tasks and were required to develop new competence, the majority of participants showed heightened interest despite varying levels of achievement. End-of-course surveys were conducted with each cohort. This paper summarizes the findings from 82 participants in the two cohorts.

Critique is a central feature of design education, serving as both a structural mechanism to provide regular feedback, and as a high stakes assessment tool. However, this study addresses informal peer critique as an extension of this existing form, engaging students in communication outside of the formal pedagogy. The purpose of this study is to gain a greater understanding of the role of informal critique in externalizing design thinking and judgment, as analysed through Bourdieu’s habitus. Structures surrounding critique, including the role of informal vs formal spaces, objectivity vs subjectivity of critique, and differences between professor and peer feedback are addressed. Beliefs about critique are analysed as critical elements of an evolving habitus, supported by or developed in response to the culture inscribed by the formal pedagogy. Informal critique reveals tacit design thinking and conceptions of design, and outlines the co-construction of habitus between students and the formal pedagogy.

"Is English for Linguistics (EL) a domain of interest for EAP? Is the metalanguage for linguistics (e.g. lexical precision, semantic and pragmatic appropriateness) sufficiently taught at university level? Which strategies are most appropriate when developing presentation skills with regard to language competence in the field of linguistics?
This paper sets out to address these questions, adopting the viewpoint that competence in EL is probably taken for granted at university level and less researched than it should be.
Strategies to encourage the development of this particular metalanguage, with reference to specific lexical items and semantic areas, are investigated in peer-assessment procedures,
which would seem to be particularly effective at postgraduate level when integrating syllabus content and language skills to negotiate and reflect critically on this aspect of EAP.
Despite general agreement over the usefulness and impact of peer-assisted educational strategies (Topping 1988; Falchikov 2001), there is a striking lack of experimentation on peer
assessment, especially when it comes to formal recognition and inclusion in university syllabuses within EAP practice. The rationale of this paper builds on a pilot project carried out
at the University of Messina (Italy) in 2010, in a course of English Linguistics for postgraduate students in Foreign Languages and Literatures in which systemic-functional and crosscultural
socio-semiotic approaches to multimodal studies (Baldry & Thibault 2006; Kress & van Leeuwen 2006) were the major focus of analysis. Part of the course consisted in the development of individual projects, assessed both by the teacher and their peers with the ultimate goal of developing reflective, linguistic, metalinguistic and presentation skills. Related issues are discussed, such as students’ development of assessment grids, the integration of contents and metalanguage, and the consistency between peer and teacher evaluations. This approach helps expand students’ language autonomy in articulating evaluative decisions and priorities regarding their own and their peers’ learning outcomes. The mastery of a specialized language is targeted both as regards discussing syllabus contents
and as regards expanding expertise in the field of linguistics."

One common type of assessment in undergraduate courses in Hong Kong is a group project, which often involves a group presentation in addition to a written group report. The advantages of having students engage in a group project include learning via peer collaboration and allowing individuals to develop communication skills through interaction with group members. During oral presentations, peer assessment can be a valuable learning opportunity, because student reviewers are required to exercise evaluative skills in assessing the presenting groups. Although many research papers have reported on the significance of peer assessment in enhancing student learning and the reliability of peer assessment compared with self-assessment, the standard of peer assessment and the quality of feedback are frequently not reported. This paper will first examine perceived group performance from the point of view of individual students; it will then explore whether the tendency is for students to provide positive or negative comments and how frequently they make suggestions; finally, it will examine the categories of comment to identify the perceived variables that students address when assessing group projects.
This paper reports a study on an undergraduate course, ‘Garment Manufacture’, in a university in Hong Kong. Among the intended learning outcomes for the course, students were expected to develop professional knowledge in identifying the common causes of garment make-up problems and determine remedial processes. Simulating industrial practice, one assessment task was a problem-based analytical group project in which each team was required to make up a garment, explain the nature and causes of problems, and make suggestions on the correct manufacturing steps to take in order to avoid producing similar defects. All groups used PowerPoint as their presentation aid. Each student was given a peer feedback form on which to provide an overall grade, qualitative feedback to assist each group to improve their explanatory skills, and other optional comments.
Hong Kong students are competitive in university study and may be reluctant to provide quality feedback to peers. Therefore, the authors wanted to examine the quality of student peer feedback on group projects. This feedback was graded by one of the authors, as this might encourage students to make a good effort in providing the feedback professionally. With 97 students in the cohort, feedback forms were selected from the top, middle and bottom 10 percent of students, based on overall academic performance, which included tutorial discussions, group projects, class assignments and sit-in examinations. Student names were removed from the selected feedback forms and were coded by the second author, who had no teaching role in this course. Feedback was first coded in terms of whether it was positive, negative or suggestive; it was then coded according to the nature of the feedback content, presentation aids (visual and layout), presentation skills and group collaboration. In the paper, feedback quality is critically reviewed, and recommendations are made to improve the standard of peer group feedback.

This paper offers a window on an ongoing initiative in evaluation and assessment in higher education, and in particular, focuses on the development of a holistic feedback environment that includes an extensive process of providing feedback on feedback.  Early research evidence identified the benefits for students participating in peer assessment in the area of music performance, and which supports the significant body of literature that refers to the advantages of applying peer assessment mechanisms towards the development of critical evaluation and assessment skills. The most recent phase in the research project involved the establishment of a methodology to explore in detail the perceived value of feedback provided to students by both staff and peers, via the development of a survey completed anonymously and which required both qualitative and quantitative evaluations and reflections. Specifically, the data analysis encompassed an exploration of the number and type of comments presented by staff and peers, the relative differences between students of different year levels, staff assessments vis-à-vis students, and feedback on the received feedback. The findings propose a number of insights into the validity of assessment received by both staff and students, highlights the potential value and impact for those receiving a range of evaluations, and evidences the need for an ongoing process of review of evaluation and assessment practices in the light of participant experience.

"Typically, higher education assessment is based on staff evaluations of product, be this in the form of such traditional items as essays, exams or reports, or more innovative practices such as technology based projects, portfolios or industry oriented tasks. While expert and external assessment is clearly essential for any learner, the issue of how to engage students more actively in evaluation processes requires consideration, given the recent focus on generic skilling and
graduate outcomes such as critical thinking and assessment skills. After all, higher education graduates are required to assess their own and the work of others, regardless of the type of career to which they move into. In terms of a mechanism to assist in the development of critical skills, considerable attention has been directed toward the value of peer assessment within higher education"

Traditionally, assessment has been seen as something done by academics after the teaching and learning takes place. In this paper we argue that it is timely to rethink our approach to assessment, and who is implicated in the acts of judgement which lie at the heart of both formative and summative assessment. Assessment is more likely to lead to valued learning if some of the judgement employed belongs to students, and not just the academic-teachers (Boud, 1990; Nicol and McFarlane-Dick, 2006). Through two case studies, we illustrate how the development of students’ skills in assessment and especially self-assessment can become more prominent in our curriculum and learning objectives. Our experiences suggest not only that student learning can be enhanced in this fashion, but that there are efficiency gains for teaching academics too: outcomes that become especially important as we seek ways to overcome the challenging expectations experienced by modern-day academia.

In 2005, I published the first scholarly article on the US National Science Foundation’s Broader Impacts Merit Review Criterion. In the intervening years, much has happened, both in terms of scholarship on the Broader Impacts Criterion and in terms of the Broader Impacts Criterion itself. Here, I revisit that original article, answering some questions, filling in some blanks, expanding some bits, contracting others, updating and generally rethinking the whole thing. The National Science Board has also rethought the Broader Impacts Criterion, and 2011 marks the gestation, if not the birth, of a much different criterion, a sort of Broader Impacts 2.0. Now, then, seems like the perfect time to think once again about NSF’s Broader Impacts Criterion and about the dialectic between the values of autonomy and accountability in the science – society relation.