Managing Assessments at Scale at the Wharton School

Nhi Nguyen
|
November 3, 2021
DOMAIN
Business & Management
Class Size
650
Instructor Workload
Learner Workload
ABOUT THE INSTITUTION

Founded in 1881 as the world’s first collegiate business school, the Wharton School is shaping the future of business by incubating ideas, driving insights, and creating leaders who change the world.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR(S)

Linda J. Lee is the Director of Instructional Design, where she leads training and instructional design efforts for the Courseware Team at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Anne M. Greenhalgh is the Deputy Director of the Wharton Leadership Program, Adjunct Professor of Management.

ABOUT THE INSTITUTION

Founded in 1881 as the world’s first collegiate business school, the Wharton School is shaping the future of business by incubating ideas, driving insights, and creating leaders who change the world.

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR(S)

Linda J. Lee is the Director of Instructional Design, where she leads training and instructional design efforts for the Courseware Team at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Anne M. Greenhalgh is the Deputy Director of the Wharton Leadership Program, Adjunct Professor of Management.

Context

Dr. Greenhalgh and Linda Lee at the Wharton School share how they utilized Group Member Evaluation to optimize the group assessment process in their hybrid Management course over two semesters.

Constructive alignment

The motivation: Seeking a more sustainable tool to facilitate intra-group evaluation 

In her previous courses, Dr. Greenhalgh used Legacy Peer Evaluation to facilitate intra-group evaluation. The tool, unfortunately, was cumbersome for both teachers and students. The instructors had to complete multiple manual tasks (moving feedback from legacy systems to SpeedGrader in Canvas), and to continuously update the system. For students, they needed to interact with multiple assignments within the Canvas interface, which was complicated and time-consuming. Such challenges motivated Dr. Greenhalgh and the teaching team to find a more sustainable tool, which should have better user interface and tighter integration with Canvas.

“Legacy Peer Evaluation tool was very cumbersome to use and required many multiple manual tasks.” - Linda Lee

Assessment of learning outcomes

The solution: Group Member Evaluation offered tremendous capabilities for teachers

FeedbackFruits Group Member Evaluation (GME) ended up to be the solution for this challenge. 

“FeedbackFruits solved a lot of these problems, we were really excited because a lot of things Ann asked the students to do in these classes were consistent with what FeedbackFruits allow for.” - Linda Lee

During the spring semester 2020, Wharton instructors piloted GME along with the Peer Review tool in several small scale courses, one of which was Dr. Greenhalgh’s Management (MGMT) 399 course. The pilot was a huge success, motivating Wharton team to continue using GME, along with other FeedbackFruits tools in a larger student cohort. 

“The tool really worked very seamlessly. The teaching team was able to see who had done what, and the students were immediately able to see the feedback released. It was really really successful.” - Linda Lee

Notable outcomes

The outcomes: Scaling up the tools for larger size classes 

Dr. Greenhalgh absolutely loved GME as the tool allowed for execution of the entire peer review process within one interface, automatic synchronization of Canvas group, as well as offered self-evaluation/ reflection option. Due to the huge success and efficiency, Dr. Greenhalgh was convinced to use the tool in her WH101 course of 650 students for the Fall semester 2021.  

“The fact that FeedbackFruits was an enhanced, superior platform made it much easier to integrate it into WH 101.” - Dr. Greenhalgh

The WH 101 course will be structured to include both asynchronous lectures and synchronous recitation meetings. FeedbackFruits GME is added to enable group configuration, group feedback and evaluation, self-assessment, and students’ analytics. Furthermore, the teaching team consider adjusting several aspects namely configurable grading, feedback question/criteria, framing of self-reflection, handling of late peer evaluations. Most importantly, Interactive Video is also used alongside Group Member Evaluation to enable active interaction with the study materials. 

Further resources

Possible variation

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Recommended use cases

Leiden University utilizes FeedbackFruits Competency-Based Assessment solution to track competencies of students

Imperial College London utilizes FeedbackFruits to elevate self and peer assessment process for the students

Texas A&M University School of Public Health decided on a campus-wide adoption of the FeedbackFruits tool suite to enhance student engagement and implement authentic assessment.

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