Peer Assessment Tool to Provide Mid-Course Student Feedback

The Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB) as well as the CDIO organization, have adopted graduate attributes/learning outcomes upon which engineering schools can evaluate their progress and/or be accredited against. Five of the CEAB graduate attributes are focused on easily defined and assessed technical skills (knowledge base for engineering, problem analysis, investigation, design and, use of engineering tools) but seven of the attributes are more difficult to define and to assess within the bounds of traditional engineering curricula. One of the more difficult graduate attributes to build curriculum around and to assess is individual and teamwork defined, as “An ability to work effectively as a member and leader in teams, preferably in a multi-disciplinary setting.” Assessing individual work is quite easy, but assessing team work can be challenging. One of the tools available to assess team dynamics is peer assessment and/or evaluation surveys. Peer assessment and evaluation is frequently used in group work courses in two ways: a)to distribute the grades amongst the group after the work is completed and, b) to provide students with an opportunity to vent their frustration, daylight group issues that should have been brought forward earlier in the course and/or reflect on the entire experience. Most of the evaluation tools/processes are used at the end of the course, which does not provide any opportunity for students to recover from a bad evaluation and/or adjust their behaviour as a result of negative feedback from their peers. The Schulich School of Engineering at the University of Calgary, like all Canadian universities requires that students in their final year complete a two-term capstone design project. The projects come from industry and are open-ended real-world problems that generally take a minimum of 200 hours per student to complete. Three times in the course, the students had to complete an eleven question peer evaluation which was reported back to them and provided feedback on how they were perceived by their group on a ten point scale in two areas: contribution to the work at hand and, general performance in terms of attendance, participation and conscientiousness. The scores were reported in terms of a delta relative to the group average for each question. The course also included a weekly personal learning journal and it was possible to track the students’ reactions to their evaluation. This paper will describe the process for the peer evaluation process within the framework of an eight-month capstone design course and, provide a roadmap for incorporation of this tool into group projects.

Proceedings of the 11th International CDIO Conference, Chengdu, China, June 8-11 2015