Get started using a digital teammate peer assessment platform
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Build your teams
We guide you through using the Peer Assess Pro platform for your first teammate peer assessment survey and its management.
Get Started Today! Register for your FREE accountChecklist
- Review the ambition, mission, and key features of Peer Assess Pro
- Register to use the Peer Assess Pro through the Xorro survey management platform
- Create a team arrangement (teamset) for your group assignment
- Create and launch a teammate peer assessment activity
- Undertake the mid-survey management activities
- Arrange to conduct courageous conversations and feedback events with your students
- Finalise the survey
- Explore the comprehensive Peer Assess Pro user interface features
Get started through formative assessment
Throughout this book, we illustrated how a digital teammate peer assessment platform can help you conduct more effective group assignments. At the close of each chapter, we indicated how the Peer Assess Pro platform contributes towards each of the seven steps for effective team assessment presented in Figure 1.2. Now, let’s get started using the Peer Assess Pro platform for your first teammate peer assessment survey and its management.
You need not wait until your next teaching semester to begin gaining the benefits from using the Peer Assess Pro platform to undertake teammate peer assessment. Simply introduce teammate peer feedback with your existing group assignment. Specifically, add a formative peer assessment into your students’ group work.
Given early formative feedback, some of your students will be nudged towards improving their process of working together with improvement to the quality of their delivered outputs. You will also receive advance warning of at-risk and dysfunctional behaviours by teams and individuals that you can address proactively. Your ‘lived experience’ with both the Peer Assess Pro platform and teammate peer assessment will embolden you to embark on a more ambitious integration of formative and summative peer assessment into your subsequent teaching programme, and inform your design of more challenging and authentic group assignments.
Remind yourself of the 5 pillars that underpin fair and successful group assignments, Table 1.2 explained further in Why peer feedback?, Chapter 2. To support an immediate, shallow entry tactic, advise your students why and how you will conduct the peer assessment, details which were provided in Step 2 – Build your teams, Chapter 4. You might also announce a selection from appropriate academic policies, presented in Why peer feedback?, Chapter 2.
This immediate shallow entry approach is detailed as TACTIC 1 in Tactics for designing the group assignment, Chapter 3.
What is Peer Assess Pro?
Peer Assess Pro enhances the fairness and effectiveness of teamwork using teammate peer assessment. Peer Assess Pro provides teammates with personal reports that encourage timely, constructive conversations around their strengths, and opportunities to improve their contribution to the team’s future achievement. In essence, Better feedback. Better teams.
Peer Assess Pro’s mission is to create better educational outcomes for tertiary students. The mission is achieved through Education as a Service: a software app that helps teachers to conduct group assignments that raise students’ teamwork capabilities, minimises dysfunctional teams, eliminates freeloading, and calculates fair grades based on contribution.
REVIEW Movie 3.1, which illustrates key elements of the student and teacher journey using the Peer Assess Pro platform.
REGISTER for a free Xorro account to use Peer Assess Pro. Peer Assess Pro is hosted by the Xorro survey manager platform. This link will take you to the Xorro first-time registration page https://www.peerassesspro.com/first-time-registration/.
REVIEW the prices and terms of use for the Peer Assess Pro peer assessment survey, https://www.peerassesspro.com/pricing/. For a first-time teacher, we suggest you select the pay-as-you go Individual License until you convince your department or institution to pre-pay for an Institutional license.
Create a Peer Assess Pro survey
The key stages in the survey creation and launch process are presented in Gallery 11.1 and detailed in the steps that follow. The Peer Assess Pro teammate peer assessment survey uses the standardized, authoritative rubric illustrated in Table 3.2. The survey, as experienced by students, is presented in Gallery 5.1. An example of the personal feedback reports that students will receive is shown in Gallery 8.1.
Gallery 11.1 Get started with Peer Assess Pro – Create survey step
- ARRANGE the teamset for your group assignment explained in Gallery 4.1, Step 2 Build your teams.
- Adapt your classlist or gradebook to designate the arrangement of your students in each team in which they will undertake their group project. Use a spreadsheet editor such as Apple Numbers, Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel to produce your teamset.
- Important! Specify the top, header row with the correct headings id, first, last, email, team, and group. The sequence of columns or rows is not material.
- Important! In general, specify the identical group description for every student in your class. For example Ornithology101 Formative.
- Finally, export (download or save as) your teamset as a comma separated variables (CSV) file that will appear like Figure 6.1 described in Step 4 Create the peer assessment, Chapter 6.
- Help! For a sample teamsets in csv, Excel and Google sheets format, view Peer Assess Pro™ Reference Guide, Section 2.2 Create the peer assessments participants csv.
- LOGIN to the teacher’s home screen of the Xorro Q platform, https://qf.xorro.com/pages/home
- LAUNCH your Peer Assessment from Xorro Q. As you progress through the LAUNCH process
- IMPORT the teamset file you created as the CSV format file in Step 1. As the import progresses, all your teams are listed with each of their teammates, so you may confirm the arrangement is as you expect.
- The platform may also display various warnings that alert you to minor or serious faults in your teamset. Severe warnings, such as the same student allocated to two teams, will halt the launch process until you remedy the faults in your teamset CSV file.
- The FAQ – I’m having problems importing my participants teamset CSV presents a schedule of additional warnings and remedies.
- Specify an Activity Title that helps your students recognize the peer assessment activity your want them to complete
- Specify the Start Date that determines when the survey will become available for your students to complete. The students receive an email notification guiding them to the survey URL immediately the Start Date and Time is reached.
- Specify the Due Date that indicates to students by when they should complete the survey.
- REVIEW details then CREATE the peer assessment activity. Upon successful creation, you will be presented with the Peer Assess Pro Teachers Dashboard. There will be little for you to view (a) Until the Start Date passes (b) And until the more proactive students have submited their survey responses, and (c) Until at least one team has reached the minimum number of required survey submissions to become a valid assessed team.
TIP! Postpone the Start Date for at least an hour, or until the time you next meet your students in class. Reason: When the Start Date is reached, all students receive an email notification requesting them to complete the Peer Assess Pro survey.
If you delay the Start Date: Time you can review the Peer Assess Pro dashboard to confirm that team composition and other conditions you have specified are as you expect. If you made a serious mistake, you can select FINISH then ABANDON the activity without tormenting the students with unnecessary email notifications.
TIP! If you learn a student has been arranged into an incorrect team, simply correct your original teamset CSV file. Next, use the Team Composition menu to reimport the complete, corrected CSV.
The Team Composition Update process applies should you need to add, drop, or swap a student or add or delete teams. Survey responses will be preserved for teams unaffected by the team composition update. As good practice, avoid using the ABANDON feature to adjust team composition.
Manage the peer assessment activity
Mid-way between your Start Date and Due Date, the Peer Assess Pro platform notifies you by email guidance for reviewing the progress of your survey. Active warnings on the Teachers Dashboard present exception conditions and the remedies you can take. These issues are discussed in Step 5 Manage the peer assessment, Chapter 7. The images in Gallery 11.2 illustrate key steps in this process.
Your key actions, prompted by the Active Warnings window, include
- UPDATE the team arrangement of your group assignment, when new students have entered the class, students have quit the class, or a team needs its members to be reallocated into another team.
- IDENTIFY and ADDRESS freeloaders, where a team appears to have a significantly underperforming teammate
- IDENTIFY and ADDRESS students who appear to have an overestimated self-assessment of their contribution, when compared with the perception of their teammates
Gallery 11.2 Key steps in managing the peer assessment
- REVIEW low rated individual students’ personal feedback reports to confirm that qualitative feedback is consistent with the quantitative peer assessed scores given. Be prepared to counsel these students.
- REVIEW symptoms of dysfunctional or counterproductive peer assessment behaviour. As for many of the Active Warnings, Peer Assess Pro generates a personalized pro forma notification email for each affected student that you can select to transmit.
- REVIEW ‘teacher feedback’ provided to the you about the survey, group assignment teamwork or general class matters.
- ADDRESS problems related to notification emails being invalid, missing, or rejected by a student’s email service
- REMIND students to complete the survey. The platform automatically notifies students who have not responded 72 hours before the Due Date.
TIP! Although you may have just 50 to 60 per cent of student survey responses submitted by the mid-point, Publish provisional results to the students. Provisional publication gives students the chance to advise you of any concerns arising from their specific report. Their feedback may suggest you require a teammate resubmit their survey before you Finalise the survey.
Conduct courageous conversations
Once the Due Date has been reached, prepare to conduct feedback events amongst students described in Chapter 8 – Courageous conversations.
- Enter your final set of team results.
- Enter your choice of personal result calculation method and scale factor.
- Check, publish or update the personal results for view by your students. The students are automatically notified by email when their feedback reports are available to view or have been updated.
- Avert or resolve any student appeals or protests. See Chapter 8 – Resolve Student protests, and Appeals against a peer assessment result.
Finalise the survey
In addition to the graphic results shown in the earlier galleries, Gallery 11.3 shows examples of the final gradebook and other reports you access from the Peer Assess Pro platform.
After dealing with any minor adjustments, FINALISE the results
- So that no further surveys can be submitted by students
- So that no further adjustments can be made to official results by the teacher.
- Download the Peer Assess Pro summary gradebook and
- Transfer the results into your institution’s gradebook system.
- Conduct a review of your peer assessment experience as a basis for Step 7 Improve the next cycle, Chapter 9.
Important! Note that students can continue to submit survey responses beyond the Due Date until you FINALISE the survey.
Important! Students can view their personal results for a period up to two weeks following the date upon which you FINALISE the survey.
Gallery 11.3 Key steps in managing the peer assessment
From the Xorro-Q Facilitators Home page, the teacher can access
- RUNNING ACTIVITIES. All Peer Assess Pro activities launched and not yet finalized
- RECENT RESULTS. Most recent Peer Assess Pro activities that have been finalized.
- RESULTS. All Peer Assess Pro activities that have been finalized.The gradebook, charts, personal feedback reports and other reports can be accessed and viewed for all running and finalized Peer Assess Pro surveys.
Explore user interface highlights
As you explore the Peer Assess Pro dashboard, you will discover a variety of additional features, some of which are illustrated in Gallery 11.4
- Click through the active warnings to reveal explanatory details and preview emails that you can choose to transmit to students
- Click through any student’s name to preview the personal reports that would be viewed by individual students once you PUBLISH the results (‘live’ mode’). Their current view is the ‘published’ view, initially hidden.
- Sort tables by clicking on the table column header
- Adjust the spread of results within teams, by selecting an alternative the personal result method. Adjust the scale factor for the Normalized Personal Result method for more refined precision.
- Focus attention on the members of specific teams in the team results table
- Focus attention on low performing or high performing students by selecting a bucket in the class results for example, 0 to 15
- Click through the survey notifications history to reveal the emails delivered to specific students
- Download qualitative reports that present ‘who said what about who’ for the entire set of survey responses, even when some teams are not yet valid assessed.
- Download the summary gradebook, a detailed quantitative report, and feedback to the teacher
- Note the additional charts, tables and statistics in the advanced statistics dropdown menu
- Download the charts.
- Focus attention on selected aspects of the charts by clicking on the legend or selecting a crop area
- Publish to students your current ‘live’ view. Make further adjustments, for example to team results or spread. Then update the ‘published’ view to match the revised ‘live’ view
Gallery 11.4 Key steps in managing the peer assessment
Resources
Get Started Today! Register for your FREE account- First time registration https://www.peerassesspro.com/first-time-registration/
- Video tutorials https://www.peerassesspro.com/resources/video-tutorials/
- Quickstart guide for teachers https://www.peerassesspro.com/quickstart-guide-for-teachers/
- Resources for students https://www.peerassesspro.com/resources/resources-for-students/
- Latest news and blog https://www.peerassesspro.com/blog/
- Latest version of this eBook https://ebook.peerassesspro.com/ebook
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