Rubrics for academic dissertation assessment. Does peer assessment work?

Abstract

In the recent context of student-centered learning, they are more involved in the whole learning process, while the teacher is only a guide through their learning. This implies that students must be also involved in the assessment process. Following this idea, the peer assessment tries to give the students the opportunity to be in the evaluator position and maybe experience a reflexion about the criteria, what an external person sees in what he/she has to assess. When students have the role of assessing their classmates work, they pay more attention to the content and formal details of the presentation; therefore they can easily identify key points involved in an academic dissertation. This is a good opportunity to actively learn some basic transversal skills for any kind of presentation. Under this context, we present in this paper a comparison of the marks given by both students and teachers, to the same academic dissertation. In addition, we provide the rubric provided to students as a guide for the assessment. As results show, the students’ final decision to assess their peers’ work is quite close to the teacher’s decision. Only light differences were identified, on average, students gave a slightly higher mark to their classmates than the teacher did. However, a correlation on students and teacher marks was found.