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students and their tutors (e.g. Orsmond et al 1996,
1997, O'Donovan et al., 2004). As O'Donovan
etal. (2004) points out this tacit knowledge about
criteria is obtained from the shared experience of
the staff when using the criteria for marking and
feedback. Their conclusion is that the best way
to create meaningful knowledge of assessment
and standards is through both explicit communi-
cation and tacit transfer processes. Supervising
and engaging the students in interpretation and
negotiation of criteria as preparation for peer
assessment activities could be a method of me-
diating this meaning and contributing to a deeper
learning through the peer assessment process. It is
important not to be too detailed when explaining
criteria as this could reduce them to a list to be
followed precisely in an instrumental way in the
hands of the students.
The idea that students should actively be
engaged in negotiating criteria is supported in a
meta-analysis of 48 quantitative peer assessment
studies by Falchikov & Goldfinch (2000). When
comparing peer and teacher marks they found
results which indicated that criteria derived from
students, or when the students have agreed on the
existing ones, give a better teacher-peer agreement
in marking than if the criteria were only supplied
by the teacher. Results from the same study also
indicate that the use of well understood and explicit
criteria give more accurate judgements than when
students are left with little or no guidance on how
to interpret the criteria. Furthermore the use of
global judgements instead of assessing several
individual dimensions seems to be an important
factor in the success of peer-reviews. Overall the
study indicates that students in fact can make
reasonably reliable judgements.
each university selected a few courses in which
peer assessment was implemented. The data in
this chapter derives from a 10 week long course
within a programme for special needs teacher
training. The duration of most courses within this
programme, as well as the majority of our online
and distance courses, is five weeks followed by
the final examination procedure. The reason why
this particular course was chosen is because of the
richness of data accumulated due to the length of
the course. However, similar results have emerged
to various degrees in courses of shorter length,
and in courses which are not part of a programme
and with an even more heterogeneous mixture
of students than in the course where data for this
chapter was collected.
The special needs teacher programme is
carried out as a distance course with obligatory
on-campus meetings every fifth week. The first
part of the on-campus week is usually devoted to
final examinations of the current course, while the
second part is used for the introduction of a new
course and introductory lectures.
The students on this programme can on one
level be described a homogenised group, since
a teaching certificate is a prerequisite for the
programme. The students vary in age between
participants in their late twenties up to age fifty
plus students, and their teaching background varies
from preschool teachers to college teachers and
everything in-between. The course is taken by
students from all over the country, which means
that many of them have conducted their previous
studies at other universities. It also means that
there is a great variety in students' backgrounds
when it comes to length of previous academic
studies as well as in the content and design of
those studies.
This may explain our previous experiences of
students attending this programme. Some students
already seem to have a basic understanding of
the academic culture and what they are expected
to perform when assessed while others tend to
be very unsure of how to tackle the assessments
our Conditions When trying
out Peer Assessment in
a distance Course
Guided by the findings from previous research
on peer assessment the project participants at
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