Abstract
Involving students as partners in assessment activities can improve student engagement and lead to increased metacognition. Through assessing the work of their peers, students develop expertise as assessors and hence a greater understanding of what constitutes high quality work.
This study examined the benefits to students of sharing, evaluating and providing feedback on assignments written by their peers using a form of adaptive comparative judgement (ACJ). ACJ is based on the well-established principle that multiple pairwise comparisons of relative quality can be used to rank a set of items. Peer assessment using ACJ was implemented in undergraduate
courses in Physics and pre-clinical Veterinary Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. In both courses, a moderate to strong correlation was found between the quality of assignments based on student ACJ rankings and numerical marks awarded by staff. Veterinary medicine students were provided with assessment criteria to aid their judgements, however, this was not the case for Physics students. There was evidence that Physics students used surface features to justify their judgements, however, it is not clear whether this implies that surface features correlate with disciplinary quality or whether students can discern quality but lack the skills needed to articulate the underlying disciplinary constructs. Nevertheless, the importance of expert guidance to help students develop their assessment expertise is clear. Opportunities for practice coupled with timely feedback are also needed. Comparative judgement has the potential to play a valuable role in this process.
This study examined the benefits to students of sharing, evaluating and providing feedback on assignments written by their peers using a form of adaptive comparative judgement (ACJ). ACJ is based on the well-established principle that multiple pairwise comparisons of relative quality can be used to rank a set of items. Peer assessment using ACJ was implemented in undergraduate
courses in Physics and pre-clinical Veterinary Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. In both courses, a moderate to strong correlation was found between the quality of assignments based on student ACJ rankings and numerical marks awarded by staff. Veterinary medicine students were provided with assessment criteria to aid their judgements, however, this was not the case for Physics students. There was evidence that Physics students used surface features to justify their judgements, however, it is not clear whether this implies that surface features correlate with disciplinary quality or whether students can discern quality but lack the skills needed to articulate the underlying disciplinary constructs. Nevertheless, the importance of expert guidance to help students develop their assessment expertise is clear. Opportunities for practice coupled with timely feedback are also needed. Comparative judgement has the potential to play a valuable role in this process.
Original language | English |
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Number of pages | 31 |
Publication status | Published - 28 Jan 2016 |
Publication series
Name | AdvanceHE |
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Publisher | advance-he.ac.uk |