Abstract:

There is increasing interest in peer review and feedback as tools to enhance students’ active participation in the assessment process [1]. Peer review and feedback, also called peer assessment, involves students looking at each other's work and assessing it against pre-agreed criteria. Students then give each other feedback on the work. Peer assessment can be used both summatively and formatively. Peer feedback in a formative context allows students to benefit from an external view of their work, in a structured and constructive setting. Students internalise better the marking criteria, since they need to understand and apply the grading criteria in order to assess other students' work. They have the opportunity to observe how other students approach assignments, and to benchmark their own work. This last point can have benefits across the ability range. Poorly performing students can get a better understanding of the standard required. At the same time, students of greater ability get a better “feel” for the quality and value of their own work. As with any work, peer assessment activities need to be carefully designed to limit opportunities for plagiarism. However, if students are doing the same task on different primary research papers, then they cannot copy each other’s work. Moreover, as part of the assessment, they will need to engage with additional papers e.g. they will need to read and work with a paper to produce their own assignment, but will also need to think critically about one or more other papers during the assessment that they do.

This paper describes the way research and teaching have been integrated in the assessment for the undergraduate module Evolution, using formative peer review and feedback. Students were allocated a paper from a previously identified list of important papers in Evolutionary Biology and given appropriate instructions to write a précis of the paper in the style of a Nature' News and Views article. Students were also told that good work would be used to build up a “library” of level-appropriate summaries of key papers for future students. After work was handed in, students were asked to read and comment on two précis; this part of the process was conducted following a double blind peer-review structure. Work was then briefly scanned by the lecturer to ensure that comments were correct and appropriately detailed, with additional comments added as appropriate. This did not take long as most reviewers had been thorough and work was not, at this stage, being marked. Work was then returned to students with the comments and they were allowed to modify work as appropriate to deal with the reviewers' comments. Work was then handed in for the second time, with students submitting both the commented drafts and the final versions. Student feedback was gathered using an anonymous Assessment Experience Questionnaire (modelled on the one developed by [2]).

References:
[1] P. Orsmond (2004) Self- and peer-assessment, guidance on practice in the Bioscience, Teaching Bioscience Enhancing learning Series, The Higher Education Academy. Available from ftp://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/TeachingGuides/fulltext.pdf [7 June 2012]
[2] E. Brown, G. Gibbs and C. Glower (2003) Evaluation tools for investigating the impact of assessment regimes on student learning. Bioscience Education, 2:5. Available from http://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/journal/vol2/beej-2-5.aspx [7 June 2012]

Keywords:

Research-Informed Teaching, research mindedness, teaching-research nexus, peer assessment.