This post is a response to an exercise from Week 6 of OU H880 Technology Enhanced Learning. We’ve been asked to assess and describe a number of methods of peer assessment to help out a producer for a MOOC on creative writing. So, here goes…
Peer Assessment
Well, what it says. Students are put in the position of teacher/assessors, grading other students’ work. To make this work you’ll need:
- A clear rubric – they need to know what “good” looks like
- Guidance and training in assessment techniques
- You may need a moderation process to deal with potential conflicts or contentious issues
This method works well in that it gives students a better understanding of what an assessor is looking for when they grade students’ work. On the down side, it may need to a narrower range of responses: students may see the rubric and start writing to the test.
Mantle of the Expert
That’s a great term, isn’t it? This is an immersive experience derived from drama workshops. Students are challenged to take on the role of an ‘expert’ in their particular domain of study. Working individually or in teams, they’re given a piece of work to assess. They must make judgements and good arguments to justify their judgements. They also have to reflect how they arrive at their conclusions.
The team is responsible for how they work and for ensuring they work efficiently and effectively, and that they take in a range of perspectives.
This one could get woolly. You need a very well-defined framework and schedule for the assessment to be completed in.
Micro Feedback
There’s a group discussion – could be online, it often is – facilitated by a teacher or mentor.
Students contribute to the group discussion, read other contributions and ‘like’ or ‘favourite’ them in the same way you can like social media posts.
The problem with this approach is that students may only post on the discussions that interest them, leading to a narrow, self-selecting set of perspectives or ‘echo chamber’.
Also…trolling may be an issue on a MOOC, so you need have a vigilant set of moderators.
Student teaches student
Divide the students into pairs or teams and have them explain a concept to another student.
They would have to come up with an appropriate teaching method, which means they’d have to make sure they have a very good grounding in the subject matter before they begin teaching.
If you’re doing this in an online environment, you’d have to make sure you have sufficient facilities – for example breakout rooms in an webinar session, before you begin. Also, many students won’t be experienced teachers, so they’ll need some guidance to build their confidence.
Multiple perspectives
Anthony R Sweat wrote a very interesting description of a multiple-perspective assessment in Faculty Focus. The idea is that it involes students in both assessing their own work and that of their peers. They evaluate it against a set of criteria and provide feedback that helps them to improve their own work.
Would this work for a MOOC? The sheer numbers would suggest not. It would be something of an organisational nightmare.
Peer assessment of applying shared knowledge in diverse contexts
O’Toole (2013) noted that distance learning brings together students for different locations and backgrounds. The one common thing they share is their interest in the subject and their online classroom.
With this form of assessment, students are given a task and asked to apply it in their own situation. For example a globally distributed group of teachers may be asked to observe a lesson in their location, which could be Beijing, or Lagos, or Sydney, and analyse it from a constructivist standpoint. They can reflect on the different approaches and feed that back to the class. The shared starting point and common task gives the student a clear sense of what and how they are assessing.
This assessment is designed for a distributed student body, like a MOOC or online classroom. An example in the context of a creative writing course, it could be take a relatively innocuous subject, such as crossing the road, and write a 200-word piece, set in your local milieu.
You could combine that with the micro-feedback model on the MOOC.
Anyway, that’s peer assessment. Next…e-portfolios!
Sarah Slade 
You must be logged in to post a comment.