There are many online courses where collaboration is the key to success. The collaborative process helps students with socialization skills and provides a learning environment in which students build off one another. Although it has been made clear that learning through collaboration in a distance learning course such as this one is imperative to student success, it is not quite as clear if the assessment process should be a collaborative effort.
According to Oosterhof, Conrad, and Ely (2008), peer grading and involving peers in the reflective process allows for the students to take ownership of their work. It is stated in Oosterhof et al. (2008) as well that many people frown upon having their peers evaluate them. As you reflect upon your discussion posts and your time spent working with groups, ponder how you feel about your peers grading your work. There may be times in your past that your instructor has given you an evaluation form to complete for your peers. Did you feel comfortable completing this task? Did you feel your peers would complete your evaluation form in a fair manner? Why or why not?
By Friday: Post your answer to the discussion questions, building on your own personal experiences. Be sure to find at least one outside source and reference all sources in APA format.
By Sunday: Respond to at least two of your peers' posts. You may elaborate on their response, ask them a question in regards to their response, or explain how your response was similar to theirs. Be sure to reference all sources in APA format.
Discussion Rubric:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EMrxCP3xUFgB4tp0uIXEMDtMkBm1xPWw-RatbmluckE/edit#heading=h.gjdgxs
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Score
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4
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3
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2
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1
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Response
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Learner gives strong response and adds
detail. Learner expands on
questioning.
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Learner responds and provides some elaboration and
detail.
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Learner responds, but does not elaborate or
provide any detail.
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Learner does not respond
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APA Formatting
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Learner uses APA format all the time.
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Learner uses APA format most of the times
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Learner uses APA format some of the time.
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Learner does not use APA format.
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Reference Material
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Learner provides references and adds an additional
reference outside give sources.
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Learner uses all given references.
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Learner uses some given references.
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Learner uses no reference.
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Oosterhof, A., Conrad, R.-M., & Ely, D. P. (2008). Assessing learners online. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.
According to Oosterhof et al (2008), in the case of collaborative work assessment, the assessment strategy often chosen by the instructor is that of evaluating “the team project or product without regard for individual contributions to the end result” (p.215). This causes frustration to the students who view one or more of their group members as free riders (Oosterhof et al, 2008) and think that the actual workload was not equally or fairly distributed. The one-grade-fits-all approach is detrimental to a group project’s success primarily because it does not focus on holding each learner accountable for his/her performance. This problem is not confined to learning environments but collaborative projects in business environments can also suffer from problems related to within-group and outside-group accountability (Oosterhof et al, 2008; also see Section 10.3 in Portny et al, 2008).
ReplyDeleteA more personalized approach to assessing collaborative work appears to me to be fairer. Current technology, e.g. wikis, allows the instructor to track each learner’s contribution (Beldarrain, 2006). Another way to collect information on a learner’s contribution is to ask the members of a group to evaluate each other’s effort (Oosterhof et al, 2008; Palloff & Pratt, 2007). This is an approach that is both democratic (very close to the empowerment approach to project evaluation [Fitzpatrick et al, 2011]) and helpful in terms of the learners’ developing critical thinking and social skills. It adds a layer to the instructional process and broadens a course’s scope.
I do not remember ever being graded by a peer, nor have I ever been asked to evaluate a peer’s performance, and I believe, I would feel very awkward if I were ever engaged in the peer-assessment process. However, the key is to understand the formative focus of peer-assessment. I think, the understanding will greatly reduce the assessment anxiety. In Program Evaluation, we often discussed the resistance some stakeholders may demonstrate to any attempt at their program being evaluated – a phenomenon that Donaldson, Gooler, and Scriven (2002) refer to as excessive evaluation anxiety (XEA), which leads to such negative consequences as, for example, “lack of cooperation by critical stakeholders”, compromised quality of the data collected “due to false reporting”, “challenges to the validity of evaluation results”, ”lack of utilization of evaluation results”, “dissatisfaction with program evaluation” (p.263). All this applies to learning environments, too. The psychological comfort of those whom you use as your primary sources of data is instrumental to an objective performance evaluation.
Unless I am 100% certain that the peers assessing my performance are past the anxiety stage and were sources of reliable and valid information, I do not think that I would trust their opinions.
References
Beldarrain, Y. (2006). Distance education trends: Integrating new technologies to foster student interaction and collaboration. Distance Education, 27(2), 139-153
Fitzpatrick, J. L., Sanders, J. R., & Worthen, B. R. (2011). Program evaluation: Alternative approaches and practical guidelines (4th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.
Oosterhof, A., Conrad, R.-M., & Ely, D. P. (2008). Assessing learners online. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.
Palloff, R., & Pratt, K. (2007). Building online communities: Effective strategies for the virtual classroom. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Portny, S. E., Mantel, S. J., Meredith, J. R., Shafer, S. M., Sutton, M. M., & Kramer, B. E. (2008). Project management: Planning, scheduling, and controlling projects. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Hi Marina,
DeleteI may be wrong, but I though we provided peer feedback when we working with groups in the course we had last summer. I think you and I have been together throughout the past 2 years, correct? Did we only have to work together in teams and never evaluate? I could be wrong for sure. I have been busy since ;-) Thanks for your reply! I do completely agree with you that reducing the anxiety of peer feedback is key. Great feedback to my blog.
I can honestly say that I have felt comfortable completing peer evaluations. What contributed to this was the fact that the group expectations were clear and set the tone for what we each knew that we would be evaluated on. I would liken this to a well-designed rubric. It becomes difficult to refute feedback based solely on the expectations that were set forth at the beginning of the assignment.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you and understand your point of view. I have felt that Walden designed a course that made grading peers feel safe to me and I felt fine with my peers grading me. Thanks for the reply!
DeleteJenny,
ReplyDeleteI like your rubric selection. It is a clear and simple rubric, there is nothing to not understand there. Clear to follow for any instructor and easy for the learner to know what the expectations are, as our resources have recommended
Great work as always!
Ruth
Thanks Ruth! I had a tough time with the linking portion of the rubric, so I just posted it directly there in case you were not able to see it through the link. I think mine is simplistic because I am used to making things quite basic for little ones in kinder. :-)
Delete