Improving report writing by peer assessment using Coursera

Abstract

Report writing is an important skill for engineers. In the course ?Introduction to Mobile Communication? at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) all students must write three reports. Two of them are on a given task in the lab while the third one is much more open as they can decide on a topic themselves. The reports are part of the course evaluation (30%) together with an oral exam (70%). In the previous course design, the students used to hand in all reports by the end of the course. The teacher would then grade all reports and after the oral exam the students would be notified of their final grade. This is the traditional way of doing assessment, so called summative assessment [1]. This year the assessment in the course design is changed. The intension is that the report writing develops from being purely an assessment task to be also a learning task. Thus, there are added a learning objective: ?Write and evaluate reports on mobile communication?. In order to implement this, the students must get feedback on the reports during the course. I.e., write one report, get some feedback that can be used to improving the second report. For the second report they also get feedback and then finally they have a lot of input for the third and final report. By getting feedback throughout the course the students can gradually improve their report writing and hence do better on the final exam. This method is also called formative assessment ? getting timely feedback that closes the learning loop [1]. In the new course design peer assessment is used as the method for formative assessment. It is well known from studies of peer assessment [2] that it is a very efficient way of doing assessment as it saves on teaching resources and supports the students? learning. One interesting finding is that what you really learn from is not only getting the feedback but also giving feedback. Some assumptions about peer assessment can be summarized in two statements that are investigated in this paper: The evaluation from students is as good as the evaluation from the teacher The students learn a lot from doing the evaluation To support this peer evaluation process the e-learning platform Coursera has built-in facilities for peer assessment and it was used for implementing the peer assessment for report writing in this case. Our findings are that the consistencies of the peer grades are quite good, and that there was generally a good relation between the peer grades and the professional grades. Furthermore, analysis of grading distributions from all assessments in the course has been made in order to investigate the improvement in report writing, i.e., the applicability of peer assessment as a learning tool.