The Effects of Peer- and Self-assessment on the Assessors

Abstract

Recently, there has been a growing interest in peer- and self-assessment (PSA) in the research community, especially with the development of massive open online courses (MOOCs). One prevalent theme in the literature is the consideration of PSA as a partial or full replacement for traditional assessments performed by the instructor. And since the traditional role of the students in assessment processes is the assessee, existing works on PSA typically focus on devising methods to make the grades more reliable and beneficial for the assessees.What has been missing in the picture is the assessor: How are those conducting peer- and self-assessment impacted by the process? This question has become relevant from educational perspective, because in PSA, the students take on the role of the assessor, as well.We present PSA as an active learning exercise for the assessors and examine its impact. For this, we incorporated PSA into a university-level Introduction to Natural Language Processing course consisting of more than 100 students and analyzed student surveys and exam results of peer-, self-, and no-assessment groups. The final exam performance suggests that PSA is helpful for learning, which is consistent with the student survey results. Also, students generally enjoyed conducting PSA.