Peer assessment accounting for student agreement

Abstract

Peer assessment has been gaining significant ground as a means of fostering an environment of accountability and responsibility for group projects in higher education. A popular peer assessment method assigns individual grades via a linear relationship to peer assessment scores. Using this method, a group member who receives his or her group's average peer assessment score is assigned the instructor-given group grade; the group member who receives a total peer assessment score of zero is assigned an individual grade of zero. Unfortunately, applying this method often requires time-consuming exploratory data analysis because of the potential for the method to yield a high spread of grades, including grades over 100%. The present study proposes a modification, which accounts for the degree of student agreement. When the modified procedure results in a change from the group grade, the direction of change is always the same, but with smaller magnitude, requiring less subsequent data analysis and instructor time demands. Easy-to-modify SAS code for applying the method is presented in the Appendix.

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.…”

“…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.…”

“…Moreover, there are numerous articles describing how different assessment tools and mechanisms are applied to teamwork. Thus, for example, with regard to differentiation between group and individual grading, Neus (2011) and Weaver and Esposto (2012) propose coassessment systems by means of which students grade their peers, with each individual mark being obtained from the average of the grades received from peers and the group mark awarded by the professor. According to these authors, systems supported by peer feedback are more accurate than those which only use feedback from the professor.…”

Using online peer feedback in formative assessment for medical sonography students teaching: the student view

“…This is an approach where students learn with and from each other without the immediate intervention of a teacher. 4,5 Peer teaching and learning is attractive to teachers because it is reported to be logistically and economically efficient while retaining effective teaching and assessment. 6 There are many ways of implementing peer teaching and learning, including "peer assessment", "peer teaching", "peer learning", "peer tutoring" and "peer feedback".…”

A robust approach for mapping group marks to individual marks using peer assessment

“…group mark and peer ratings entered manually in a reusable worksheet), effort and moderation is demanded from the tutor. We present a model that extends that of Conway et al (1993) to also include: (1) a normalisation of raw ratings which yields similar results to those of Li (2001) with less computational effort; (2) a partial inter-rater agreement correction based on the study of Neus (2011); and (3) a constraint on above-average contributions to limit marks to a maximum of 100% (Nepal 2012). The developed peer assessment model is validated first using numerical test cases where the previous methods have shortcomings, or only some individual modifications succeed, and further using real data from a variety of disciplines with group work components of different nature and variable group sizes.…”