WebPA

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Groups

Groups are teams of students organised under one heading.

What are Collections?

In WebPA, collections are used to help manage lots of groups at once. Each collection contains all the groups that will take part in an assessment. Each assessment can only run for one collection of groups.

Collections are created by setting up a name, then selecting the student information. Groups are then formed by associating students, as illustrated below. Typically, a collection of groups might be all students on a particular module.

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To recap:

Collection: An organization of groups all collected under one heading. A collection can contain as many groups as wanted.
Groups: A team of students who will be working together and peer-assessing each other. Groups can contain as many students required, although around 4-5 is considered the norm.
Unallocated Students: Within a collection, students can only be a member of one group at a time. Students who have not yet been placed in a group are listed as unallocated.

Why set up Groups?

Before setting up an assessment criteria all students should be allocated into groups. It is up to the academic how these groups are formed.

Any number of groups can be created. Once a group has been created, it is possible to base new groups on existing groups and is done by cloning a group and then changing students in and out of the group as required.

Assessment Forms

What are Assessment Forms?

The forms are the basis of a peer assessment. They are the templates that contain all the questions and assessment criteria that the students will use to rate each other. Below is an example of the types of marking criteria you could set.

Figure 1 – Example of marking criteria

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It is possible to create any number of forms, and once they are created all forms can be reused for any number of assessments. New forms can be generated that are based on an old form by copying an existing form and then altering the information.

Figure 2 – Screen shot of the forms screen for WebPA

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Assessment

WebPA allows the creation, editing and scheduling of peer assessment sessions that can be run, how and when required.

To schedule an Assessment, a form must be selected, the collection of groups selected and then the time and dates for both the start and end of the assessment period are set.

Assessments are set-up with in WebPA so that the student can only take a defined assessment once. If the same assessment is to be run multiple times with the same collection of students then two separate assessments must be set up and scheduled. Within WebPA this is easy to achieve as the assessments are reusable as are the collections.

Students must submit marks for everyone in their team, including themselves. A student cannot submit any assessment unless they have assigned marks to everyone.
If a student does not take the assessment at all, it is possible to penalise them or not. WebPA allows the size of any penalty to be awarded when the mark sheet is created.

Brief Glossary of Assessment WebPA terms

Pending: Assessments that have been written and scheduled for some point in the future.
Open: Assessments that are currently available to students
Closed: Previously available assessments that will not accept further student submissions, but no results have yet been generated from the data.
Marked: Assessments where the deadline for student submissions has passed and the results from the data has been produced.

Assessment Reports

Assessment reports and statistics related to assessments which are complete are available through WebPA.

Each report shows the students marks and grades using the parameters outlined in the related mark sheet. WebPA allows any number of work sheets to be created, each with different parameters. This feature of WebPA allows the comparison and contrast of how algorithm can affects the final student grades.

If a overall mark received by each group in the collection is not entered then some of the reports are not available. WebPAs algorithm needs the group marks to be able to calculate the final student grades. Some of the reports, such as the marks awarded and the response information, can be viewed at any time as they do not require the algorithm to produce their results.

References

Willmot, P., Crawford, A., 2005, Validating the assessment of individuals within undergraduate teams, ICEE 2005

Willmot, P., Crawford, A., 2004, Online peer assessed marking of team projects, ICEE 2004