Project Leader: Dr Steve Cayzer, Mechanical Engineering

This project, which was awarded funding by the Teaching Development Fund (TDF) Seed, aims to bring qualitative and quantitative data on comparable departmental experiences of in person peer/peer assessment and hybrid peer/peer assessment, use students as co-creators/co-trainers of evaluation criteria, report on hybrid dynamics in relation to inclusivity, bias, attainment gaps, re-inclusion rates and student retention/completion rates and make recommendations for future practice to embed into post-pandemic teaching and learning experiences.

In peer evaluation students become centred in their assessment process, enhancing critical thinking, reflection and employability. It mitigates for process marks where staff cannot be present, encourages individual and social responsibility and speaks to citizenship and sustainable practice. It needs careful scaffolding, management of expectation, creation of clear criteria, however all of these processes can be navigated with the students to develop a valued ownership which is inclusive and participatory – enabling full feedback cycles, reflection and development.

This project is concerned with the dynamics and validity of peer/peer assessment when students are moving between virtual and real spaces. Does this increase or reduce bias? Does it enable us to learn from students’ new experiences of hybrid presences and absences in a way that we can develop into future practice?

This will be trialled on a unit ME50361, which has already been run very successfully in hybrid form in 2021-22. Formative peer assessment will be introduced to this unit and the results compared with 2 other units ME30197 and ME50367 on which there is summative peer assessment.

A focus group will be used to explore students experiences of giving and receiving feedback in hybrid settings; this will add richness and depth to the quantitative results of peer evaluation.

Dr Cayzer gave an update on this project at Edufest 2023