- Title
- Respondent disengagement from a peer assessment instrument measuring Collaboration Viability
- Creator
- Heslop, Benjamin; Stojanovski, Elizabeth; Iverson, Simon; Paul, Jonathan W.; Bailey, Kylie
- Relation
- Australasian Journal of Engineering Education Vol. 22, Issue 2, p. 95-106
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/22054952.2018.1437676
- Publisher
- Taylor and Francis Australasia
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- Undergraduate group projects are intended to improve the ability of students to collaborate, a skill considered critical by many employers. If such groups become unviable, for instance due to interpersonal conflict or imbalanced effort, intervention by the lecturer may be required to alleviate this problem. The article proposes Collaboration Viability (CoVi) as a construct to indicate the degree to which a team is failing. Peer assessment instruments are designed to establish the relative contributions of team members, but are rarely used to measure emergent group-level properties, such as CoVi. Averaged per-group peer assessment ratings from 458 undergraduate engineers (forming 72 teams) demonstrated an overall weak, but statistically significant, correlation between CoVi and their group mark (r = 0.25, p = 0.04), adjusting for academic ability. A Self and Peer Assessment Resource Kit (SPARKPLUS) online instrument was used that comprised 13 questions, categorised according to whether they related to contribution, competence or teamwork. Individual questions were unevenly correlated with performance, which based upon general principles of survey design, was postulated to be attributable to poor design of some of the questions. It was further postulated that the cumulative effect of poor question design was respondent’s disengagement from the instrument. Consequently, to improve the peer assessment methodology employed for this research, a novel, three-step process was recommended. First, a short, non-divisive instrument measuring peer’s-perception of collaboration; second, intervention by the lecturer of low-CoVi groups; and third, in recidivist groups, as SPARKPLUS currently does, application of a validated peer assessment instrument to algorithmically adjust marks.
- Subject
- sparkplus; peer assessment; cognitive dissonace; disengagement; collaboration; pilar
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1429702
- Identifier
- uon:38752
- Identifier
- ISSN:1325-4340
- Language
- eng
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