Quantitative analysis of approaches to group marking

Group work, where students work on projects to overcome challenges together, has numerous advantages, including learning of important transferable skills, better learning experience and increased motivation. However, in many academic systems the advantages of group projects clash with the need to assign individualised marks to students. A number of different schemes have been proposed to individualise group project marks, these include marking of individual reflexive accounts of the group work and peer assessment. Here we explore a number of these schemes in computational experiments with an artificial student population. Our analysis highlights the advantages and disadvantages of each scheme and particularly reveals the power of a new scheme proposed here that we call pseudoinverse marking.Comment: 13 pages, 1 table, 4 figure

Work in progress: a quantitative study of effectiveness in group learning

It is generally assumed that group studies are more effective for students than individual studies. The objective of this work in progress is to quantitatively evaluate and analyze the effect of collaborative studies on individual student’s performance. This effort would help the student stimulate interest in group learning and collaboration along with exposing them towards multiple problem solving approaches while working individually or in groups. This way the students are challenged to use their existing knowledge and approach, and augment it further with the knowledge and approach provided by group partners. While there are several efforts that focus on developing new group learning techniques, we intend to study the efficacy of previously proposed techniques under various test settings for EE and CS courses without significantly diverting from the course framework

Facilitating change: tablet PC trials across two distance education focused universities

This paper reports on initial findings in comparing two distance universities’ approaches to trialling tablet technology to enhance communication between instructors and students. There were different reasons for initiating the trials and different approaches to each of the trials, but there were also some striking similarities. For instance both trials were led from the bottom up, however they were each conducted with no knowledge of the other. Funding for each of these trials was resourced from a university learning and teaching grant/fellowship and both projects used an action research approach. The emphasis for both trials was on pedagogical and technological staff development facilitated and administered through each project leader. The paper gives an overview of how the trials were conducted, what did and did not succeed and what could be improved. Longer lasting outcomes that have been achieved through these projects are described. This comparison is meant to guide and inform change agents and identify good practice in the management of technology trials

Student experiences of peer review marking of team projects

Peer review of students is a partial response to critics of group work who cite drawbacks of "free riders" and de-motivation. It is often used to motivate and focus students on their own development within a group work setting. Pressures of time, budget and student numbers often obviate deeper study of alternative assessment techniques. The study reported in this paper, made possible by an HEA grant, allowed for analysis of a peer review mechanism that had been operating for a number of years alongside a new web-based system. The paper reviews criticisms of peer review techniques in existing literature and outlines how student experiences of peer review were researched. Qualitative outcomes are discussed alongside an analysis of quantitative data from the systems used. Key conclusions from this research are that the data collection method made no significant difference to the reported student experiences of peer review or to the peer review marks. The findings update and strengthen previous literature and provide important new insights into the emotional perspective of students. The findings from this research are being used to aid development of the webbased system and to establish 'good practice' guidance on the deployment of this valuable and innovative technique

In search of grammaticalization in synchronic dialect data: General extenders in north-east England

In this paper, we draw on a socially stratified corpus of dialect data collected in north-east England to test recent proposals that grammaticalization processes are implicated in the synchronic variability of general extenders (GEs), i.e., phrase- or clause-final constructions such as and that and or something. Combining theoretical insights from the framework of grammaticalization with the empirical methods of variationist sociolinguistics, we operationalize key diagnostics of grammaticalization (syntagmatic length, decategorialization, semantic-pragmatic change) as independent factor groups in the quantitative analysis of GE variability. While multivariate analyses reveal rapid changes in apparent time to the social conditioning of some GE variants in our data, they do not reveal any evidence of systematic changes in the linguistic conditioning of variants in apparent time that would confirm an interpretation of ongoing grammaticalization. These results lead us to questio

Rating scale development: a multistage exploratory sequential design

The project chosen to showcase the application of the exploratory sequential design in second/ foreign (L2) language assessment comes from the context of rating scale development and focuses on the development of a set of scales for a suite of high-stakes L2 speaking tests. The assessment of speaking requires assigning scores to a speech sample in a systematic fashion by focusing on explicitly defined criteria which describe different levels of performance (Ginther 2013). Rating scales are the instruments used in this evaluation process, and they can be either holistic (i.e. providing a global overall assessment) or analytic (i.e. providing an independent evaluations for a number of assessment criteria, e.g. Grammar, Vocabulary, Organisation, etc.). The discussion in this chapter is framed within the context of rating scales in speaking assessment. However, it is worth noting that the principles espoused, stages employed and decisions taken during the development process have wider applicability to performance assessment in general

Formative peer assessment in a CSCL environment

In this case study our aim was to gain more insight in the possibilities of qualitative formative peer assessment in a computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment. An approach was chosen in which peer assessment was operationalised in assessment assignments and assessment tools that were embedded in the course material. The course concerned a higher education case-based virtual seminar, in which students were asked to conduct research and write a report in small multidisciplinary teams. The assessment assignments contained the discussion of assessment criteria, the assessment of a group report of a fellow group, and writing an assessment report. A list of feedback rules was one of the assessment tools. A qualitative oriented study was conducted, focussing on the attitude of students towards peer assessment and practical use of peer assessment assignments and tools. Results showed that students’ attitude towards peer assessment was positive and that assessment assignments had added value. However, not all students fulfilled all assessment assignments. Recommendations for implementation of peer assessment in CSCL environments as well as suggestions for future research are discussed