Diversifying Assessment 5: Involving students

Section 5: Involving students in the assessment process

Reproduced with permission from Brown, S. Rust, C. and Gibbs, G. Strategies for Diversifying Assessment in Higher Education Oxford: Oxford Centre for Staff Development (1994)

Assessment is all about making judgements. A major argument for involving students in self and peer-assessment is that it helps them to develop the ability to make judgements, in particular about themselves and their work. This is an important life skill as well as an academic one. Research in Australia (Midgley & Petty 1983) showed that recent graduates rated the ability to assess their own performance among the most important skills used in their jobs, but one that their degree courses had almost totally ignored. It follows, then, that we should consider the ways in which these skills can be developed within existing courses.

Below are a number of ways in which students can be involved in assessment on their courses. Tick ones you currently use on your courses, and note those it might be possible to use in the future.

Many lecturers automatically think of marking when they hear the word 'assessment'; note that only the last two methods suggested here involve students in the formal marking process. There are many ways in which students can be involved in assessment and develop their judgement without involving them in marking their own work or that of others.

5.1 Developing Judgement

If you develop students' ability to judge their own performance early in the course, this should lead to a general improvement in their achievement. After students leave higher education, they are likely to be heavily reliant on their own judgement of themselves and their peers, to estimate how effective they are in a wide variety of professional contexts. For these reasons, it is important that these skills are developed; assessment strategies should aid this development. Some strategies to help students develop their judgement are described below.

Marking exercises

Arrange for students to see examples of good and bad work. Pieces that have been marked and have the tutor's comments on them make a good starting point for getting students to think about the assessment process. See Section 2.2. for other exercises.

Self-assessment comments

With the piece of work the students hand in, require them also to include a sheet of self-assessment comments. These could simply be under a few headings, as below.

Alternatively, this could be done on a feedback sheet (see Section 2.2.). If the student's ticks are in one colour you can then add yours to the same sheet in another. Where there are discrepancies, and obviously different perceptions, you can give detailed feedback.

Peer assessment feedback

Possibly easier than assessing one's own work, especially to start with, is to read and comment on the work of others. Students should therefore be encouraged to get into the habit of getting informal feedback from each other.

One course originally required the students to write two essays, one towards the beginning of the course and one near the end. The tutor became despondent that despite all the efforts spent marking and writing comments on the first essay, invariably there was little improvement in the second.

Instead of two essays the course now requires only one, which is written in two stages. In the first stage the students write a first draft of their essay. They are then paired up and each pair reads and gives detailed feedback on the other's piece of work. In the light of this feedback, the students then redraft their essays. When the essay is finally submitted, it is accompanied by an account of how the feedback has been used, e.g. 'I've included more sources because the first draft was criticised for relying too heavily on just two. I've kept the introduction exactly the same even though it was said to be unclear because I don't agree...' etc.

It is true that only one topic is now assessed, rather than two as before, but the tutor argues the following advantages:

• it develops students' critical faculties;
• significantly better work is produced;
• it is more like the 'real world' - good writing involves redrafting in the light of criticism;
• the marking load has been halved;

5.2 Self and peer marking and grading

There is a considerable difference between self and peer assessment and self and peer grading. While the former incorporates feedback in the final product, the latter relies on students marking their own and each other's work against a set of criteria and model answers provided by the tutor. It is largely unskilled in its performance and often has little to commend it other than that it can save tutors' time. There is also enormous potential for cheating and collusion.

Peer marking from model answers

Peer marking occupies the middle ground. There are occasions when students can be set work and receive feedback on it which would otherwise not be possible because of staff workload.

This works well on an engineering course where students who did badly in the exam were felt to be in need of more practice in working through numerical problems. There was no way, however, that the staff could contemplate yet more marking. The solution they adopted was to set the students problems on a regular basis to solve in their own time, and to allow twenty minutes at the start of certain lectures for these to be marked.

This is done by rows of students swapping work; the lecturer then leads them through a model solution. Although 170+ students are involved, they have become increasingly efficient at doing this and need less time - only 7 minutes on one occasion. Students benefit from:

• seeing the preferred solution, with the weightings of an examination marking scheme explained;
• seeing the variety of approaches taken by their peers;
• increased practice at working on problems and the associated feedback.

There has subsequently been a significant improvement in performance when it comes to the exam.

5.3 Self and peer assessment

There are many reasons why students should be involved in the assessment of their own and each other's work, actively using and developing their own evaluative skills:

• it encourages a sense of ownership of the process, so students are committed to the outcomes, rather than dismissing them as the ramblings of an inadequate or biased external evaluator;
• it develops a whole range of transferable skills, valuable to students during their course and in subsequent employment, and facilitates lifelong learning;
• it helps students to become more autonomous learners, better able to recognise the strengths and weaknesses of their own work;
• it enables assessment to become part of the learning process rather than an adjunct to it;
• it encourages deep rather than surface learning, so that superficial attempts to regurgitate information are replaced by a greater commitment to understanding and applying information.

Implementing self and peer assessment

Self and peer assessment are not panaceas for all the problems of assessment. Like a lot of valuable innovations in teaching and learning, the effort involved is front-loaded, requiring a great deal of advance preparation. To involve students successfully in their own assessment it is important to:

• brief students and fellow tutors thoroughly before introducing the processes, making it quite clear in advance what is expected of them;
• explain carefully the purposes of self and peer assessment to all parties, so that they don't see it as a dereliction of your duty as a tutor. Point out to students the benefits of becoming involved in assessment;
• make sure that students are working with explicit criteria for success, either provided by tutors or negotiated with them;
• ensure that whenever students are evaluating work they provide full and appropriate evidence for the marks or awards given, based upon the agreed criteria;
• provide opportunities for rehearsal of the process in stress-free contexts. If possible, let there be a dry run which doesn't carry marks or at least begin on a small scale so that hiccups don't become disasters;
• collaborate with colleagues who have already used self and peer assessment if possible, so that you don't try to reinvent the wheel and can learn from their mistakes;
• and don't expect to get everything right the first time. Note what worked and did not work in the first instance and build in the results of the learning experience to the assignment with the next cohort of students.