Quality of peer assessment in CS1

Hamer, J., Purchase, H.C. , Denny, P. and Luxton-Reilly, A. (2009) Quality of peer assessment in CS1. In: 5th International Workshop on Computing Education Research, Berkeley, CA, USA, 10-11 Aug 2009, pp. 27-36. (doi: 10.1145/1584322.1584327)

Abstract

<p>While popularity of peer assessment in Computer Science has increased in recent years, the validity of peer assessed marks remain a significant concern to instructors and source of anxiety to students. We report here on a large-scale study (1,500 students and 10,000 reviews) involving three introductory programming classes which recorded grades and feedback comments for both student and tutor reviews of novice programs. Using a paired analysis, we compare the quantitative marks given by students with those given by tutors, for both functional and non-functional aspects of the program. We also report on an analysis of the lexical sophistication of feedback comments.</p> <p>We find good correlations that improve with student ability and experience, and that marks for functional aspects correlate more closely than those for non-functional aspects. Our lexical sophistication analysis suggests student feedback can be as good as or better than tutor feedback. We also observe that a policy of selecting tutors based on their previous peer assessment performance leads to a large improvement in tutor feedback.</p>

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Purchase, Dr Helen
• Authors: Hamer, J., Purchase, H.C., Denny, P., and Luxton-Reilly, A.
• Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science; L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB2300 Higher Education
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science