Guidance for staff
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17th Sep 2015 - at the current time we do not recommend using PeerMark due to an unresolved bug where the PeerMark reviews summary page and the downloadable excel spreadsheet don't reflect actual numbers of reviews received/submitted. ELE are investigating a resolution. Meanwhile, apologies for this. |
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In the 'Peermark Assignment' tab of the PeerMark Manager you enter basic information about the activity. Title - displays for students and should be distinctive and descriptive. Point value (required) - Turnitin PeerMark requires students to give feedback only i.e. no numeric mark from students, so Point Value refers to the number of marks available for the review itself. Instructions to students - brief guidance about what students should do and why. Start date, Due date, Feedback release date Then click Additional Settings. |
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Considerations corresponding to the settings above Instructions. At first students do tend to prefer tutor marking. They may assume that there is a correct mark for their work which is not open to interpretation (McConlogue, 2012). For this reason, avoid relying on textual instructions alone. Most researchers (including Bloxham and West, 2007; McConologue, 2014; Nicol, 2010; Orsmond, 2004; Topping, 2009) agree about the need to involve students in discussing and ideally negotiating the yardstick against which they will measure others and themselves. It is important to discuss the rationale, criteria and expectations for peer and/or self review before, during and after the activity. Discussing or negotiating expectations clarifies how much time students are expected to spend on each review and how much feedback should be given. This helps to even out the quality and quantity of peer feedback, which in turn helps to avoid perceptions of unfairness (Cartney, 2010) and increase acceptance of peer-assessment. Less time is needed for preparation once students are familiar with the process and ethos. Dates.That PeerMark asks students to give feedback only (i.e. not a numeric mark) raises possibilities for students reviewing draft work. This can happen at an early, relatively unpolished stage which remains open to rewriting on the basis of feedback (Colvill, 2010). In this case, set the Feedback Release Date to allow time for students to make changes in advance of their final credit-bearing submission. The time allowance for the PeerMark activity (i.e. between Start Date and Due Date) should reflect the time students are expected to spend and allow for their other commitments. |
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On the 'Peermark Assignment' tab there is a link for additional settings. Here's some explanation for the less obvious ones. 'Award full points if review is written' If ticked this means tutors will not be able to mark the reviews and a student will need to meet set requirements for every part of the review in order to get the available marks, on an all-or-nothing basis. If unticked, tutors can assign and differentiate marks for each student's review. 'Allow students to view author and reviewer names' If left unticked, you probably need to remind students not to put any identifying information in the title, filename, or body of their work. 'Paper(s) automatically distributed by Peermark' This sets the number of randomly allocated papers each student has to review. 'Papers(s) selected by the student' This sets the number of papers a student can choose to review. Students can review a combination of allocated and selected papers. 'Require self-review' If checked, a student has to review their own paper. It isn't currently possible to select self review only - the number allocated by PeerMark has to be at least one. |
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The 'PeerMark Questions' tab of the PeerMark Manager allows you create the questions you want the peer reviewers to answer. To add a question, click 'Add question'. | Image to come. | ||
Enter your question text, the question type. There are two types of question you can use; |
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For a 'Free response' question, enter the minimum answer length (this counts words). |
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For a 'Scale' question, enter the scale size and the lowest and highest values. |
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You can also use Libraries to manage your PeerMark questions. To create a Library, click 'Save to Library' > 'Add Library', and name your Library - when you save the Library, the questions you have created are saved to that Library; to retrieve questions from a Library, click 'Add From Library'. A question may exist in more than one Library.
There is also a 'Sample Library' from which you can add pre-made existing questions from.
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Considerations Who decides the questions? Peer assessment researchers strongly recommend involving students in developing and clarifying the assessment criteria - even if they arrive at similar criteria to the tutors (and of course the criteria are likely to be aligned to the module's intended learning outcomes). Involving students in this way increases a sense of ownership, reduces anxiety, and also promotes a shared understanding about the meaning of the criteria. As well as improving the reliability and validity of the assessment, it also builds confidence in the process. Orsmond (2004, Section 2) discusses alternative techniques for introducing assessment criteria to students, including giving opportunities to practice applying the criteria. What kinds of questions? Falchikov and Goldfinch (2009) found that asking students to make a global judgement (i.e. of the submission as a whole) based on distinct criteria was more effective than either a judgement without criteria, or separate judgements of separate dimensions of the submission. McConlogue (2014) points out that as well as value judgements, reviewed students also expect feedback that signposts how they can improve; PeerMark's open question type allows for these. Order of questions. Topping (2009) recommends asking students to give positive feedback first, since this improves subsequent acceptance of negative feedback. Opportunities for practice. Again, practice is a clear recommendation from the peer assessment literature and could be incorporated into the aforementioned recommended discussion of the criteria. |
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Please note that after reviewing has started you won't be able to pair students - so do make any allocations in advance. |
In the 'Distribution' tab of the PeerMark Manager Assignment manager you can see all the student accounts associated with this assignment and how they will be allocated reviews. If you want to, this is where you can get involved with who reviews whose work. If you can't see all the accounts you are expecting, click outside of the Peermark Manager to return to your Turnitin assignment page; then click its 'Turnitin Students' tab. From there you can click 'Enrol all students', which will bring in all students 'enrolled' in that Moodle course areaspace. |
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If you need to exempt student from the PeerMark activity, you can exclude them by clicking their adjacent red Minus icon; their name displays greyed-out and they gain a green Plus icon, which you can click if you need to reinstate them. If you want to pair students (so that a particular student is allocated the work of another particular student to review, overriding any other distribution settings) you can do so by clicking the blue Plus icon and then selecting a student to pair with from the dropdown list. Paired students are then required to review the work they are allocated. Note that PeerMark displays this as a 'Forced' allocation. |
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Considerations. Does it matter which students review which other students' work? By default Turnitin makes random allocations, but if tutors want students to connect e.g. on the basis of interest, there are alternative ways to do this. Tutors can manually pair individual students through PeerMark. Or thirdly, PeerMark has the option of letting students choose the work they review (note though that this introduces the possibility that some students will receive feedback from more sources than other students - which may be contentious). |
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