1. Would you please mark my text for me
Would you please mark my text for me? Improving students’ writing and collaborative skills with the help of the Peer Assessment tool on Blackboard
Sabrina Wagner

2. Overview The Context The Project Peer Assessment on Blackboard
The Results
Conclusions and Outlook

3. The Context 2014-15 2 Intermediate Groups (B1), about 30 students
Mixed group of students
‘Weak’ cohort (based on exam results semester 1)
Goethe-Zertifikat B1 to pass after Semester 2

4. The Project
Students were given writing tasks from model Goethe exams on a weekly basis
Students would write their texts and then upload them onto Peer Assessment on Blackboard
The week after, every student was given another student’s work to peer assess on Blackboard
The tutor also marked the texts so that students could compare
Formative assessment

5. Peer Assessment
The tool sounded more straight-forward to use than Turnitin
No one had ever used it (including e-learning)
Blackboard update around Easter
new features introduced
the data was lost

6. Results On average, about 10 students participated regularly
Writing improved considerably over the semester, all of the students passed the Goethe exam
Increased student awareness of the marking criteria used for this exam
Students preferred writing over evaluating
Students were mostly too lenient in their evaluation
Students gave the tutor’s marks more credibility

7. Conclusions and Outlook
Peer Assessment would work best when ALL the students enrolled on the course participate in the exercise
Tutor must be able to see students’ view on Blackboard, otherwise it’s a guessing game
Tutor can download the students’ submissions as html files
Extra work for the tutor
Peer Assessment again? Turnitin? Other?
Peer Assessment across different levels?