Summative peer assessment using ‘Turnitin’ and a large cohort of students: a case study

At the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam, the use of peer assessment is increasingly\nbeing considered by lecturers that want to give their traditional lecture-based courses\na more active learning component. Prins et al. (2005) point out that peer assessment\ncan be very well integrated in such courses and research shows that formative peer\nassessment results in an increased understanding of the learning content, the\ndevelopment of assessment skills and a reflection on one’s own learning\nperformance (Hamer, Kwong et al. 2005; Prins, Sluijsmans et al. 2005). However, the\nvalidity and reliability of peer-generated marks is still under debate (Cho and Schunn\n2003). In order to support peer assessment in courses with large cohorts of students,\ncomputer support can be regarded as a necessity to manage the whole process of\nassignment submission and grading.\nThis paper describes a case study on the use of a commercial peer assessment\napplication for summative peer assessment. It describes the course set up, the use of\nthe software and use of the generated marks for summative purposes. The study\nshows that the system is easy to use for both instructors and students and that it can\nsupport large cohorts of students despite some technical problems. The students are\nvery positive about the benefits of peer assessment for their own learning, but they\nhave a low confidence in peer assessment for summative purposes, despite\nconsiderable efforts to motivate the students and to build in measures to increase the\ngrade reliability and validity.