1 | Using technology to support a triad approach to assessment
There has been a major shift in how learning and assessment are viewed in higher education. Instead of positioning learning as an acquisition process and assessment as grade assignment, educators now believe that students should actively construct their own knowledge and skills, and assessment is a critical contributor to this process.
In other words, assessment should and must empower students, as well as help them develop skills needed for learning outside of the classroom and throughout life. The triad approach, which combines self, peer and teacher assessment, was therefore developed to help achieve this goal.
Self-assessment allows students to reflect on their own performance, and it is a key tool to empower students in the assessment process.
Peer assessment refers to the evaluation of students by their peers to encourage autonomy and responsibility in learning. Most importantly, peer assessment is considered an effective strategy in addressing free-riding, ensuring fair, accurate assessment of individual performance, as well as identifying potential conflicts within groups.
Teacher assessment in higher education was previously restricted to summative practices like midterm or final exams [1]. However, instructors have begun to integrate formative assessment into their curriculum to increase transparency and participation, motivation and attention, as well as cultivate a student-centered learning process where they can actively construct knowledge and skills.
Combining these 3 assessment types is proven to help students develop lifelong skills, while reducing the workload for teachers.
However, three major concerns when facilitating this approach in an online/hybrid environment are 1) students’ lack of skills and experience to self-reflect and provide peer feedback; 2) the time-sink of facilitating the 3 assessment types; 3) a lack of motivation and engagement among students.
However, digital technologies (when utilized correctly) can be a wonderful sidekick to help instructors overcome these barriers. According to Dr. Norman Vaughan, “collaborative digital technologies such as blogs, wikis, and other social networking applications in higher education” are key to quality assessment. In online/ blended learning, technology becomes “an enabler for increasing meaningful personal contact", thus fostering a personalized learning experience.
So how exactly can we exercise this combined approach in online/hybrid classes, with the help of pedagogical technology?
Replacing intense, stressful testing sessions with self/peer grading assignments, e-portfolios, or written reports significantly fosters higher-order thinking skills and in-class collaboration. These activities can be easily designed and implemented by employing pedagogical tools.
Teachers can rely on different teaching tools to design projects (portfolios, presentations, videos, etc.) where students can submit assignments and then review their peers’ work, as well as reflect on their own performance. Finally, instructors provide comments on students’ submitted work on the digital platform, identifying misconceptions and providing explanations to help students.
As an example, using Group Member Evaluation, Griffith University issued self-to-peer grading as an alternative assessment among medical freshmen. Instead of taking individual exams, students worked in groups to produce and present an academic poster, then evaluated their group members' evaluations based on a given rubric. Scores given by peers contributed to 15% of the total final grade.
Two instructors of Boston University also successfully utilized teaching tools to facilitate peer assessment. For an MBA online course of 400 students, the teachers wanted to incorporate elements of peer feedback, group work, and automated grading. FeedbackFruits Peer Review was chosen to help instructors reduce the manual workload in grading for this large student cohort, while still allowing students to work both individually and in teams to provide meaningful feedback.
The course curriculum was structured with asynchronous lectures in the first half of the week followed by live sessions in the second half. A Peer Review assignment was arranged after each live session. For this, students submitted and conducted formative evaluation of each other’s submitted Executive Memo based on a 3-criteria rubric designed by teachers in Peer Review. At the end of the course, they were asked to write a Formal Memo which was marked by the instructor as a summative assessment.
2 | Maximize the power of online discussion
Asynchronous and synchronous discussion is another effective method that instructors can use to establish effective dialogues and communications in online/hybrid settings. The opportunity to provide clear, concise responses to both teachers and peers allows students to cultivate critical thinking, and evaluation skills, while further reducing teachers’ workload.
Pedagogical technology, again, allows teachers to create “seamless discussions in online classes” [2]. For example , instructors can design discussion group project activities in which students work collaboratively to create a project (a presentation, a video, or a paper), upload their work, then provide feedback on other groups’ work based on a given rubric.
In an engineering course at the bachelor’s level, instructors at Deakin University successfully implemented online discussion as the alternative assessment. Using FeedbackFruits Discussion on Work, the Deakin team created an online poster conference for students to showcase, view, and comment on each other’s posters. These posters are results of the thesis project conducted throughout the school year. In total, around 75 students uploaded their work and about three quarters of them actively contributed to discussions in the tool, writing about 2-4 comments each. The Discussion tool was found to be effective for stimulating a discussion among students,
“They were willing to go out of their way and discuss with no pedagogic push” – Catherine Fraser, Teaching Scholar at Deakin.
Online discussion with support from technology was also adopted for an open-enrollment course issued by MIT. Students were required to produce a report based on the face-to-face lectures and then give feedback on their peers' work. This feedback was used as input for an online discussion in which instructors and learners together elaborate on outstanding comment points. Not only did this activity foster critical thinking and self-regulated learning, but it also motivated students to focus on improvements instead of the end results.
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