Chemistry Is in the News: assessing intra‐group peer review

Abstract

Interdisciplinarity is rapidly becoming a norm within both the professional and academic worlds, and the ability to collaborate is becoming an essential skill for all graduates. Chemistry Is in the News (CIITN) is a curriculum that aims to teach students this skill by engaging student collaborative groups in a project that ties real world events and topics to the content taught in the classroom. While the collaborative activity has been successful in many ways, the challenge of maintaining individual accountability within the collaborative activity has persisted. The need to balance the tension between promoting collaboration and maintaining individual performance standards drove the development of an intra-group peer review system. In developing this peer review system, four goals guide the design: the desire to promote collaboration, to produce a differentiated score among group members reflecting the contribution each person made, to improve student perception of fairness and accuracy in the assessment process of CIITN and to avoid artificially inflating students' grades. The system was assessed in the winter semester of 2004 in a large lecture course at a major Midwestern university via student questionnaires and the CIITN scores. Evidence is provided to suggest that the intra-group peer review system has met its core goals.

Using peer assessment to evaluate teamwork from a multidisciplinary perspective

“…Positive attitudes towards the use of peer assessment activities have also been previously reported (Fellenz 2006;Wen and Tsai 2006;Sergi 2007;Carson and Glaser 2010;Gransberg 2010;Neus 2011;Weaver and Esposto 2012), and student attitutes towards groupwork have even been described as more positive when peer assessment is used (Chapman and van Auken 2001). This positive perception can be explained by the advantages of peer assessment compared to the traditional system of evaluation, which assigns a mark to all members of a workgroup.…”

“…The main problem faced by professors is detecting and differentiating between those students who have participated most and least in teamwork (Fellenz 2006;Carson and Glaser 2010;Gransberg 2010;Anson and Goodman 2014). The present study demonstrates that peer assessment is useful in reducing this difficulty associated with groupwork.…”

“…In general, such studies conclude that these techniques are effective and that students' perceptions are usually favourable (Sergi 2007;Carson and Glaser 2010;Gransberg 2010;Neus 2011;Weaver and Esposto 2012). Moreover, there are numerous articles describing how different assessment tools and mechanisms are applied to teamwork.…”

Design and assessment of an assignment-based curriculum to teach scientific writing and scientific peer review

“…To build this capacity for constructive feedback on original works requires significant content expertise and writing practice. Meaningful curricula for science writing and peer review thus can be connected to laboratory courses (Walker & Sampson, 2013) or to lecture courses with substantial (Carson & Glaser, 2010;Hume et al, 2006) or intensive writing components.…”

“…The activities aim to connect real-world social, economic and political issues to the learning of chemistry. The CIITN pedagogical framework Glaser & Carson, 2005;Glaser & Poole, 1999) and technical issues (Wu & Glaser, 2004) of the implementation have been described and reviewed (Carson, Hume, Sui, Schelble, & Glaser, 2009;Glaser, 2003Glaser, , 2013, and results of evaluations (Carson & Glaser, 2010;Hume, Carson, Hodgen, & Glaser, 2006) have been reported. The entire CIITN peer review is conducted by students and includes an assessment framework for both individual and group assessment, rubrics to guide peer review and an intragroup peer review tool.…”