Abstract:

Active learning is one of the ways to motivate students to perform better in education and to acquire and develop not only knowledge in their field but also different types of skills and competences. Active learning includes a wide range of educational activities and strategies that, in contrast to "traditional" instructional education in which students are passive recipients of knowledge, support the active involvement of students in the teaching process. Such strategies include also team-based activities.

Trying to employ team-based activities in high school teaching, we introduced team project into programming education. However, we encountered the problem of evaluating teamwork. As we do not consider the egalitarian evaluation of all team members to be fair, we have introduced team assessment and self-assessment as part of teamwork. Such assessment involves the students themselves evaluating the contribution of individual team members to the joint project, as well as their own performance.

Since our high school students have not yet experienced this type of activity in the classroom, we were interested in whether and to what extent they would be able to evaluate the work of their teammates and their own. The research was conducted over the course of one school year and 89 high school students participated. Two programming projects were included in the programming class, which students worked on in teams of typically three members. After submitting the project, they were given the task of evaluating the work of the team mates and also their own in two ways: by assigning a percentage rating and verbally.

In this paper we focus on the preliminary results of this method of evaluation, the acceptance of this activity by the students and, most importantly, on its benefits from the students' point of view. It turns out that for high school students, evaluating classmates but also self-assessment is quite a challenging task. Nevertheless, a large number of students declared in the final questionnaire that they liked the activities. Many of them appreciated that thanks to the activities they had learned to communicate better, to be critical, self-critical but at the same time objective in their evaluation, to formulate their thoughts better, etc.

Preliminary results of our research show that activities using peer assessment and self-assessment not only help the teacher to evaluate teamwork more fairly but also help high school students to develop important qualities and skills.

Keywords:

Team-based activities, peer assessment, team assessment, self-assessment.