Presentation on the MOARS Peer Assessment Module, March 18, 2013 in Singapore Print
Articles - News
Written by Bill Pellowe   
Wednesday, 26 December 2012 11:52

NewsOn March 19th, Trevor Holster and Bill Pellowe will give a paper on the Peer Assessment add-on for MOARS at the 48th RELC International Seminar (18-20 March 2013) in Singapore.

Title: A Mobile Audience Response System for Rasch Analysis of Student Peer Assessment

SEAMEO Regional Language Centre, Singapore

Tuesday, March 19th, 11:10 am - 11:50 am, Room 502

Peer-assessment is a potential catalyst for learning by assessing (LBA), where peer raters improve their own proficiency by assessing other students, but rater performance must be monitored to ensure that these benefits are achieved. Many-faceted Rasch measurement (MFRM) provides quality control statistics on rater performance and transforms rank-ordered raw scores into equal- interval measures, allowing the ability of persons, the severity of raters, and the difficulty of assessment items to be compared on a common measurement scale. However, data collection is a major practical limitation for classroom use of peer assessment. A peer-assessment module was developed for the open-source Mobile Audience Response System (MOARS) to gather peer-assessment data using mobile phones, making MFRM practical for immediate classroom use. Data from 185 sets of ratings by both peers and teachers of student oral presentations was analyzed. The MOARS system provided very quick and practical data collection, and peer ratings overall showed adequate agreement with teacher ratings for low stakes classroom use. However, great variation was found in the performance of individual raters, supporting the importance of MFRM to adjust for rater performance and provide diagnostic analysis of rater performance.