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Peer assessment of student class presentations

students collaborating in study area

Keywords: peer review, collaboration, industry practice. 

 

Faculty: Arts and Social Sciences

As a senior lecturer in Media Studies, Catriona Bonfiglioli tries to include an element of student peer review in each of her subjects. She sees peer review as a normal part of working life and believes that students need to learn to evaluate their peers and others. Ideally, she would like every student to have the opportunity to mark every other student’s presentation. Catriona started experimenting with this approach by using paper rubrics, which were easy for students to use but created considerable labour for tutors in collating the marks from every student, for every student and then calculating the average. After searching for technology that would make the assessment easier to administer, Catriona switched to SPARKPlus as a way to collect peer evaluations of student work.

Assessment Activity

Catriona designs an oral presentation and a peer review activity for each of her classes. The type of class presentation changes depending on the subject matter and could include debates, student-led seminars or project progress reports with a written component. The aim is to keep it interesting for the markers by ensuring that each student has something different to present. In the subject Media Power, the presentation and peer review assignment were combined into a single assessment task, each part worth 10% of the overall grade for a total of 20%. To help students mark the presentation, Catriona developed the criteria from the subject outline into a marking sheet, with a brief description of the standard expected and a scale from 1 to 5.
 
To ensure fairness and anonymity for all students involved, Catriona required all students to submit a mark for each presentation. The class list was uploaded into SPARKPLUS and a list of presenters was created in multi-assessor mode. At the start of each presentation the students were informed on which presentation they were marking and they would complete their ratings online in SPARKPlus. The program would then calculate the average score for the criterion, providing the final mark awarded for the presentation.

Benefits for staff and students

  • Students get an opportunity to practice their oral presentations. Every employer would like to have workers who are able to stand up in front of people and talk. 
  • All students were actively engaged in the presentations concentrating on the class presentation in order to give their feedback. 
  • SPARKPlus automatically calculates the student marks, making it more accurate and less time spent on data entry.

Tips and advice

  • If you haven’t used SPARKPlus to assess group work get someone to help with the set up. 
  • There is some manual handling required behind the scenes. If you want to export the results into another system like Review or the GradeCentre, it helps to have some basic Excel skills.
  • Don’t allocate more than 10% for the peer review. 
  • If you haven’t tried peer review, give it a go and you will likely be happy with how students react.

Photo credit: Chris Shain