Abstract
- Traditional class projects are designed primarily to encourage students to learn from their own project experience. Making all the students do the same projects, in this case, makes the grading manageable. Extensive research has shown in recent decades that much more learning and skill development can also happen when students actively participate in observation and assessment: students work with their peers, providing feedback and learning from each other’s experience. The peer assessment can be more effective when students are working on different cases/topics in case-study based settings. Recognizing the synergy between case-based learning and peer assessment, our project seeks to provide an online tool for peer assessment that can be deployed in any courses that use peer assessments. The activities that the investigator will engage in include: 1) building an online educational peer-assessment system which focuses on peer-nomination — a novel approach for peer-assessment in education settings; 2) making this peer-assessment system available for the UNCW community after the original development and testing; 3) collecting data from student users of this peer-assessment system; 4) using data mining to analyze students’ behavior to answer research questions related to peer-assessment reliability, validity, quality and comparing the results with other peer-assessment setups.