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Using PeerMark - guidance for staff

Contents

Table of Contents
minLevel2

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What are the benefits of student peer assessment?

It is important to discuss the rationale for peer assessment with students. A well-conceived peer assessment activity can advance:

  • Students' ability to understand and work with assessment criteria.Through formulating constructive feedback which suggests how peers can improve, insights into
  • Students' participation in the authentic academic practice of peer review.
  • Insights, through articulating judgements and producing constructive feedback which suggests how peers can improve, about how they themselves can go about critiquing and improving their own work.Students' participation in the authentic academic practice of peer review.
  • The possibility of feedback that is quicker, more individualised, and more plentiful than tutors are able to provide. 
  • The possibility of feedback on students' draft work, with sufficient time for amendments before the deadline.
  • Avoiding 'learned dependence' (Yorke, 2003) - students' over-reliance on tutor opinions, and over-humility about the importance of their own understandings which may interfere with their development.
  • Triangulation - the original submission, peer reviews and tutor assessment (not to mention self assessment where used) can be compared, giving students new perspectives on their submission, the criteria, and the reviews they have written.
  • Relatedly, insights into subjectivity and governance in the assessment process.
  • Also relatedly, a departure from monologic, transmissive feedback as students weigh up the differences in the reviews. This in turn promises a desirable change in the way feedback is received from simple certainties to more sophisticated, evaluative thinking (Schommer, 1990).
  • An occasion for dialogue with tutors and peers about assessment.

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In the 'Peermark Assignment' tab of the PeerMark Manager you enter basic information about the activity.

Title

This will appear for students and should be distinctive and descriptive.

Point value (required)

The marks available for the peer review itself - i.e. not for the reviewed work. This reflects research findings that asking students to assign numeric marks to their peers exacerbates any sense of risk and brings undue complications and pressure to peer review without bringing any particular learning benefits.

Instructions to students

Brief guidance about what students should do and why.

Start date, Due date, Post date

NB How do these relate to the Turnitin assignment's dates?

Make sure you click the 'Save & Continue' button to proceed to the next tab.


 

Info

Considerations

Instructions. Students tend to prefer tutor marking, which may indicate positivist beliefs about objectivity in marking and the assumption that there is a correct mark for their work which is not open to interpretation (McConlogue, 2012). Most researchers into peer assessment (including Bloxham and West, 2007; McConologue, 2014; Nicol, 2010; Topping, 2009) stress the need to discuss with students the rationale, criteria and expectations for peer review before, during and after the activity, rather than relying on textual instructions alone. Discussing or negotiating expectations could clarify how much time students were expected to spend on each review and an indication of how much feedback should be given. These particulars would help to even out the quality and quantity of peer feedback and avoid perceptions of unfairness (Cartney, 2010).

Point value. This should be sufficient to indicate to the students that their participation in peer review matters.

Dates. Since Turnitin The fact that PeerMark is for formative feedback , PeerMark on draft work may be helpful, in which case only raises possibilities for students reviewing draft work at an early relatively unpolished stage which remains open to rewriting on the basis of feedback (Colvill, 2010). In which 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 accommodate 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.

Info

Considerations

Award full points if the review is written. Where this all-or-nothing setting is deployed as an incentive to participate, keep in mind the importance of dialogue at all stages of peer assessment activities implies the need to create opportunities for conversations about the process.

Allow students to view author and reviewer names. Setting the peer review to be anonymous brings a number of key benefits. One is that . It is important to will prevent friendship, enmity or power processes determining the review and forestall collusion. Clear criteria and an ethos which encourages mutual constructive criticism while discouraging platitudes are other measures to allay the social comfort students may feel about commenting on others' work. It may be necessary work out with students a convention for referencing each others' work , should they want to do so, under circumstances of anonymity.in the absence of names, should they want to do so.

Allow submitters to read all papers after the Start Date. As well as allowing students to benchmark their work, this allows students to select work to review, if this has been enabled in the settings.

Allow students to read ALL papers and ALL reviews after the Feedback Release Date. Again, this communicates to students that they are welcome and encouraged to benchmark both their submissions and their reviews, and opens up the possibility of conversations which outlast the PeerMark activity.

Distribution of papers. Keep in mind boredom, tiredness and time pressures when deciding how many submissions each student should review. Falchikov and Goldfinch (2009) found that larger numbers of reviewers did not bring any validity gains and may reduce reliability due to the 'diffusion of responsibility effect' whereby students are less likely to perceive their own review as mattering. (Falchikov and Goldfinch were comparing peer and tutor numeric marks rather than feedback, though).

Require self-review. This would provide opportunities for students

 

Adding Questions

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'

Enter your question text, the question type. There are two types of question you can use;
a 'Free Response' question - for example "What is the thesis of the paper?" and a 'Scale' question – for example "How well does the introduction pull you in as a reader? Scale, Not very well to
Really well"

 

For a 'Free response' question, enter the minimum answer length (this counts words).

For a 'Scale' question, enter the scale size and the lowest and highest values

You can also use libraries to manage your Peermark questions. Clicking on Library Settings allows you to create and delete libraries, and to save and retrieve questions from those libraries. There is also a 'Sample Library' which you can add pre-made questions from.

 

Info

Considerations

  • Questions. These relate to the assessment criteria and the intended learning outcomes of the course. However, there is a clear message from the peer assessment literature about the importance of involving students in developing and clarifying criteria, even if they arrive at similar criteria to the tutors. The purpose here is to increase a sense of ownership, reduce anxiety, and also reach a shared understanding about the meaning of the criteria which (Falchikov and Goldfinch, 2009) improves reliability and validity - and with those, confidence in the process. 
  • What kinds of questions? It is very important that as well as value judgements, the feedback also suggests how the reviewed student can improve.
     
  • 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, there is a clear recommendation from the literature that students have the opportunity to rehearse working with the criteria. This could fit well with the aforementioned recommended discussion of the criteria.

 

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References

  • Bloxham, S., & West, A. (2007). Learning to write in higher education: students’ perceptions of an intervention in developing understanding of assessment criteria. Teaching in Higher Education, 12(1), 77–89.
  • Cartney, P. (2010). Exploring the use of peer assessment as a vehicle for closing the gap between feedback given and feedback used. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 35(5), 551–564. 
  • Covill, A. (2010). Comparing Peer Review and Self-Review as Ways to Improve College Students’ Writing. Journal of Literacy Research, 42(2), 199–226.
     
  • Falchikov, N., & Goldfinch, J. (2000). Student Peer Assessment in Higher Education: A Meta-Analysis Comparing Peer and Teacher Marks. Review of Educational Research, 70(3), 287–322.
  • McConlogue, T. (2012). But is it fair? Developing students’ understanding of grading complex written work through peer assessment. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 37(1), 113–123.
  • McConlogue, T. (2014). Making judgements: investigating the process of composing and receiving peer feedback. Studies in Higher Education, 1–12. 
  • Milne, R. (2013). Peer review of virology essays. Available from: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/teaching-learning/case-studies-news/assessment-feedback/peer-review-of-virology-essays
  • Nicol, D., (2007). Peer Evaluation in Assessment Review project. Available from http://www.reap.ac.uk/PEER.aspx
  • Nicol, D. (2010). From monologue to dialogue: improving written feedback processes in mass higher education. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 35(5), 501–517.
  • Schommer, M. (1990). Effects of beliefs about the nature of knowledge on comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 82(3), 498–504.
  • Sorensen, E. (2013). Experiences of using peer assessment in a 4th year design module. Available from: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/teaching-learning/case-studies-news/assessment-feedback/peer-assessment-chemical-engineering
  • Topping, K. J. (2009). Peer Assessment. Theory Into Practice, 48(1), 20–27.
  • Yorke, M. (2003). Formative assessment in higher education: moves towards theory and the enhancement of pedagogic practice. Higher Education, 45, 477–501.

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