Exploring the Development of Web-based Peer Assessment System

Peer assessment becomes a popular and effective approach to enhance students’ critical thinking skills and make them reflect more about their and others’ work. In recent years, several web-based peer assessment systems were developed in order to support peer assessment through technology. These systems have different functionality, characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses. This paper aims at discussing new trends in the development of web-based peer assessment systems by taking a closer look to ten systems. By providing an overview about the systems’ characteristics and its application model as well as discussing the target users and the changing role of teachers and students through web-based peer assessment, this paper contributes in providing an overview of web-based peer assessment, helps to understand the today’s developments, and gives recommendations for new innovations in web-based peer assessment. Introduction In a conventional classroom environment, students do an assigned work within a limited period of time. After receiving submissions from students, the teacher assesses their works. Students generally receive feedback only from the teacher. However, limited by time and workload, the instructor can not put much focus on the assessment, and students’ improvement is confined (Cho & Schunn, 2007). Peer assessing is an innovative assessment method in today’s courses, which has gradually replaced teacher assessments. Peer assessment can help instructors to spend more time on other teaching activities by reducing the instructors’ workload (Cho & Schunn, 2007). Otherwise, peer assessment enhances student interpretation and reflection; students are able to observe their peers’ work and learning process and come to better understanding of how their peers learn. In the process of peer assessment, students are capable of learning how to make judgment, criticize peer work, and accept peer criticism, thereby developing their critical thinking skills (Lan et al., 2007; Kwok & Ma, 1999). However, there are several problems in administrating reciprocal peer assessments in courses. First, student peer assessors are novices in the disciplines. Thus, their feedback and evaluation can be inaccurate relative to the * The authors would like to thank the National Science Council of the Republic of China, Taiwan, for financially supporting this research under Contract No. NSC 097-2811-S-008-001and Contract No. NSC 96-2520-S-008 -007 -MY2. feedback generated by a subject-matter expert or instructor (Cho & Schunn, 2007). The second constraint is that there is a relative inconvenience of displaying multimedia works such as music and paintings using pens and paper (Sung et al., 2005). Thirdly, executing peer assessment in the class poses a challenge, since there is little time for mutual discussions (Sung et al., 2005). Aiming at enhancing education by the use of technology, many web-based peer assessment systems were rapidly developed to solve the above problems in the recent years. But, there are few researches on exploring them. This paper aims at presenting the current developments of web-based peer assessment systems by exploring several systems and discussing their characteristics, application model and target users. The goal of this study is to show the current situation of web-based peer assessment system and give recommendation for future researches. This paper is organized the following way: the next section describes an analysis of web-based peer assessment systems. Subsequently, the application model is explained. In the fourth section, we briefly introduce the target users of the investigated peer-assessment systems and subsequently the role of instructors and students in such systems is discussed. The last section concludes the paper. An analysis of web-based peer assessment systems As shown in Table 1, this study compares the difference and consistency between ten web-based peer assessment systems. We especially looked at web-based systems supporting peer assessments in school/university activities. In the following subsections, we describe the key features used in our investigation in more detail and discuss how the systems implement them. Table 1: The characteristics of web-based peer assessment systems N et Pe as (L in e t a l., 2 00 1) SP A R K ( Fr ee m an & M ck en zi e, 20 02 ) SW oR D (C ho & S ch un n, 2 00 7) (Y an g et a l., 2 00 5) W eb -S PA (S un g et a l., 2 00 5) V ee h eu ris tic (T sa i e t a l., 2 00 2) C A P (D av ie s, 20 00 ) O A SY S (B ha le ra o & W ar d, 2 00 1) G SS (K w ok & M a, 1 99 9)