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amount of postings could be that the members of
those groups carried out some of their discussions
through physical meetings, which is indicated in
their postings in the workshop forum.
Many students made their postings in the
form of word documents posted as attachments,
perhaps because writing their postings this way
allowed more space to outline their thoughts and
made possible spell-checking etc. It could also
be a strategy to separate social comments from
on-topic remarks as many of the messages with
word document attachments contained some kind
of social comment.
Activity in all of the groups seems rather stable
over time. Data samples from the workshops in
all of the study groups indicates the dimension
“participative” (see Henri, p 125ff) since all stu-
dents (in the sampled data) received at least one
comment on on-topic postings by all group mem-
bers, although some participants seems to have
contributed with more postings than others.
The social dimension was also present in all
of the groups, through small comments about
life and personal thoughts. The discussions in
all groups also showed interactive dimensions
as the students sometimes referred to messages
made by others as a starting point for their own
argumentation. It is also possible to find cognitive
and metacognitive dimensions in the postings. A
lot of the students made spontaneous postings in
the workshop, in which they reflected over their
learning process and that they found the peer as-
sessment element intriguing because it challenged
their understanding. Metacognitive reflections
like these were also found in data collected from
their comments when they answered the online
questionnaire.
“reflective” in a scientific context. Many students
answered these questions with comments like “this
has to do with “trusting one's own judgements”, it
is when one is using 'common sense' and similar
comments. There were however others, who for
example said that it has to do with how to read,
interpret and view a text or a situation with critical
eyes, and draw conclusions.
In most of the groups differences in opinions
were not further interpreted at this stage of the
peer assessment preparation. Only a couple of
students made references to scientific literature
as a strategy to add some weight to their opinion.
Although it is visible in the postings that they took
great interest in each other's point of view they
didn't challenge each other's understandings in any
visible way. There are thus not many signs in the
data that any student changed their original view
of criteria in the data from workshop I, although
different opinions were aired.
In
workshop II
the students were supposed to
put the criteria they had agreed upon into action
by assessing two example texts. These example
texts were written to correspond with the instruc-
tions these students had when writing their own
papers or reports, but the subject was something
other than the course content. We hoped that this
would make it easier for them to identify some
general ideas in academic reasoning and reporting
if the content wasn't as close at heart as a study
in their own field might be.
Text one
was authored in a purely referential
style with a weak 'author voice', while
text two
was written in argumentative style in which the
'author voice' was present. Example text one only
referred to studies already conducted on the re-
search subject but with no clear purpose as to why
this was referred. Text two referred to previous
studies already conducted on the research subject
but connected it to issues such as general trends in
society and some comparisons with studies made
in other fields were also mentioned as a part of
the argumentation chain.
Initially the most common pattern in all study
deep Collaboration for Cracking
the Academic Code
When working with interpretation criteria in work-
shop I, the students were asked to discuss what it
could mean to be “critical”, “independent” and
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