SELF, PEER AND INSTRUCTOR ASSESSMENT OF ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE

Abstract

Group work is a commonly used learning method and continuous assessment in higher education. One of the crucial and most challenging matters with group work is to ensure the fairness in individual assessment based on their work contribution. A frequently adopted measure to address that matter of fairness is the usage of self and peer assessment, in which students are required to evaluate their own contribution to the group work as well as the performance of all their fellow group members. This research draws on the actual usefulness of self and peer assessment through (1) examining students’ ability in doing self-assessment, (2) checking on students’ proficiency in assessing their own group’s performance (intra-group assessment), (3) appraising students’ skilfulness in assessing other groups’ performance (inter-group assessment), (4) investigating the relationship between individual input performance throughout the group work process and output performance (project mark), and (5) examining the relationship between students’ project continuous assessment score and their final grade. The above objectives were achieved through studying data collected from 108 undergraduate students with different majors but taking the same module: SSD2210 Managing Singapore’s Built Environment at the School of Design and Environment in National University of Singapore. Data was collected by conducting surveys, then analysed using Pearson correlation. One-way ANOVA test was applied to test whether there is bias of gender and levels of study on the results. The findings of this study revealed that students are skilful in appraising themselves on their level of contribution to group work. They are also capable in assessing their own group performance as well as other groups’ final product. Interestingly, there is no correlation between project continuous assessment score and students’ final grades. The research also realized the impacts of students’ contributions on the final project outcome. One-way ANOVA test released that years of study may affect some aspects of the assessment results Keywords: group work, unfairness, self assessment, peer assessment, continuous assessment, grade.