Group tutoring and Formative Asynchronous Peer Assessment using e-learning technologies to Complement Staff Tutoring in Academic Writing

Abstract

Writing a master's thesis is a lonely task, which often takes longer than the nominal time. A previous study has shown that a way to counter this is to give tutoring in groups instead of individually. This paper describes and evaluates an attempt to complement individual staff tutoring with group tutoring, formative peer assessment and a self-study methodology course, using e-learning methods and without increasing the total teacher time invested for each student. The results clearly indicate the attempt was highly successful, with increased quality of the reports, decreased time for students to complete their work, and very satisfied students who believed these activities were roughly of equal use as individual tutoring even though they only consumed 15% of the total time invested by the teachers in the tutoring activities.QC 20120118</p