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research plan for the examination task to
plan, conduct and report a field study, and
were to receive constructive feedback on
this by their peers.
In
1.
The reflections the students expressed about
what impact postings from others had on
their own understanding of standards and
criteria and academic knowledge building
in general
•
Workshop V
the students presented the
draft for the final report for peer review.
2.
Reflections on the peer assessment/peer
review element
reseArCh FoCus And methods
3.
Posts which indicated a change of mind when
presenting their understanding of standards
and criteria
To answer the research questions addressed in this
chapter, data were collected from multiple sources
to gain a holistic view of how the peer assessment
element worked in the text-based environment.
Some data derives from the students' answers on
to an online questionnaire, which they answered
during the last day of the course in June 2008.
The questionnaire was answered by 51 students
(n=92% of the student group). Those who did not
answer were students who did not participate in
the on-campus meeting, where time was devoted
to this evaluation.
Additional data was collected from their dis-
cussions of the topics in the workshop forums as
well as from spontaneous comments (related to
the research questions in this chapter) made in
their workshop forums and other online discus-
sion boards provided for the course.
Henri (1992) offers an analytic framework
to deal with “the 'product' of learning (p 124)”.
Five dimensions of interaction are suggested;
participative, social, interactive, cognitive and
metacognitive, as important tools to identify the
learning processes and strategies selected by
online learners. At this stage of the evaluation
of the peer assessment implementation, it is too
early to see definite results of the quantification
of data in accordance with Henries' model, due
to the enormous mass of data generated by the
students' postings. However it has been found
useful to use these categories as reference points
when examining samples of data when trying to
get an overall view of participation.
The data collection and analysis focused on:
4.
Reflections on text-based communication.
Findings
Initially the students seemed very confused by the
peer assessment element. Some found it unrelated
to the course and complained that it took valuable
time from working on the examination tasks, de-
spite the fact that we had tried to introduce them to
the ideas behind peer assessment at the on-campus
meeting at the beginning of the course. One of the
students who answered the online questionnaire
wrote this comment:
At the beginning of the course it felt like a side
track, but as the course progressed the meaning of
the workshop became clearer to me. I developed
a new understanding of earlier activities in the
workshop. But as I said, it took a while before the
knowledge and understanding became visible and
obvious to me (in translation).
Despite the initial confusion, the students start-
ed to make their initial postings in their workshops,
and as it turned out they became truly engaged in
the workshop discussions. The study group with
highest activity made 432 postings and the group
with lowest activity made 173 postings. Some
of the difference in amount of postings between
the group with highest and lowest activity is that
there was a greater number of off topic postings
in the high activity group than in the lower activ-
ity group. Another reason for the difference in
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