Supporting peer assessment of individual contributions in groupwork

Abstract

The ability to assess the work of others is a core attribute for most professionals. To develop this graduate attribute in our students requires the learning of self and peer evaluation, feedback, and review skills. This paper discusses the changing design of peer assessment and the impact of a new groupwork support tool within a capstone undergraduate subject with large student numbers - Systems Development Project - in the Faculty of Information Technology at UTS. Since 1998 by implementing different support strategies for peer assessment of individual contributions the distribution of the students marks has markedly widened, and now more reflect the reality of differing team member contributions. This substantial change has occurred with the use of an online tool which supports the development of student evaluation, feedback and review skills when peer assessing individual contributions to large group projects. In use since 2004 the groupwork support tool is called Team Contribution Tracking (TeCTra).