Peer Assess Pro has just released a new version update. The key software features are more comprehensive email notifications, a survey notifications history, and auto-selection of the Normalised Personal Result when you enter your team results.
Comprehensive email notifications
The information in email notifications to students and teachers has been improved.
For each notification to both students and teachers, we make suggestions to our Frequently Asked Questions knowledge base that are likely to be relevant to that stage of the peer assessment journey.
As the teacher, you receive several prompts to manage your peer assessment activity. For example, as the Due Date nears you’ll be prompted to enter Team Results and conduct quality assurance of the submissions to date.
When a new activity is launched, the email advice to students about where and when to complete the survey is despatched ONLY when the Start Time has occurred. For example, this delay means you can Launch a Peer Assess Pro activity with a Start Time postponed until you next meet or communicate with your students. Furthermore, if you Abandon a Peer Assess Pro Activity BEFORE the Start Time, then students will no longer be confused with emails referring to the abandoned activity.
Survey notifications history
Notifications History enables you to track exactly what and when email notifications have been sent by the platform to students – and to the teacher. For example, this history is helpful for audit purposes such as when a student denies receiving an email from you.
Notifications History shows emails that are sent automatically by the Peer Assess Pro platform, and those initiated by the teacher in response to Active Warnings.
The Survey Notifications history feature is presented at the very bottom of the Teacher Dashboard. Click on the column Emails sent, then Message/View to examine the email sent to a specific student.
Entering team results automatically selects the Normalised Personal Result method
When you first enter your Team Results, the Personal Result Method now adjusts automatically to the Normalised Personal Result (NPR) method. A scale factor of 1.0 is the default. You will now see this adjustment made to the Class Statistics and Team Statistics charts that are selected for display.
Here’s one teacher’s example showing the personal results of a class of 129 students in 22 teams with a scale factor of 1.3. Most teams have a 20-mark spread of personal results. However, three teams have obviously low performers as peer assessed by their team members.
You may now Change Personal Result Method to select a scale factor between zero to 3.5. Use a higher value to spread the personal results for your class over a higher range for each team. A value of zero will give every team member that team’s Team Result!
The scale factor was formerly limited to values above 1.0. You may continue to select the Personal Result Method from any of the five other methods once you have entered your Team Results.
