Self and Peer Assessment: Ensuring an Equitable Assessment for Group Work.

Abstract

Team work is an essential element of good business and management practice, integrating skills and competencies, and ensuring that ‘the whole is greater than the sum of the parts’ so that business solutions developed will deliver true competitive advantage. Group work therefore plays an important part in the development of business studies students. Competent students complain that in group work, their grades are lowered due to the inclusion of lower ability students, without themselves recognising the diverse range of viewpoints that this opportunity offers. The lower ability students themselves fail to see the opportunity for raising their own personal grade profile by working with, and learning from, the more competent students. How such group work is assessed can be problematic (Gurbanov 2016), particularly when the assignment relates to problem based collaborative small groups, and employs self-directed learning and/or reflection or research seeking to acquire new knowledge. Teaching of business related topics in the Faculty of Management at Bournemouth University can involve cohorts of up to 400 students on a single unit. Efficient management of techniques for self and peer assessment of group members within such a large cohort is therefore essential (Kilic 2016). An appropriate mechanism for allowing students to successfully evaluate the contribution made by themselves, and also by other team members, needed to be developed to ensure confidence in the resulting performance gradings obtained. Taking existing best practice, and evolving it into a bespoke solution that would be operationally effective for large cohorts of students, a novel method of addressing the issue of self and peer assessment has been created, and honed over many years, to ensure that it maximises transparency for the students, whilst minimising the complexities, administrative burden and resulting queries for tutors. This poster presents an overview of the process developed, highlighting the lessons learnt. Gurbanov, E., 2016. The challenge of grading in self and peer-assessment (undergraduate students' and university teachers' perspectives) [online]. Journal of education in black sea region, 1 (2), 82-91. Kilic, D., 2016. An examination of using self-, peer-, and teacher-assessment in higher education: A case study in teacher education [online]. Journal of higher education studies, 6 (1), 136-144.