PEER LEARNING ASSESSMENTS AND THE STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS OF A DIGITAL ASSESSMENT

Theory of self-regulated learning SRL, predicts that students who conceive learning as an activity in which they participate, active that they actively participate with, will be more satisfied and experience mastery, more so than passive students conceiving learning as information being transferred from teacher to learner. We have used a Peer Learning assessment system (PeLE), developed at Sør-Trøndelag University College, short surveys and student-written reflections, as tools to investigate students’ conception of learning, in a first year mathematics course.

Through six classroom assessments, we have followed a group of engineering students from entering the class to final exam, and investigated the interrelation between different parameters, like degree of satisfaction and time spent on working with the curriculum. Responses to simple meta-questions, like: «how satisfied are you with your performance today,» fits better with the actual results found in the written tests, than the results submitted through the assessment system. We argue that in order to make “in-class assessments” formative, teachers need to teach students how to use the assessments as a part of a learning strategy rather than interpreting the activity as a summative assessment.