Peer assessment in large group projects: forming professional attitudes in IT students

Abstract

The ability to assess the work of others is one of the core skills for IT professionals. Developing this graduate attribute requires the learning of peer evaluation, feedback and review skills by students. This paper discusses the changing design of peer assessment and the impact of a new groupwork support tool within a capstone undergraduate subject with large student numbers - Systems Development Project – in the Faculty of IT at UTS. From 1998 to 2005 by implementing different support strategies for peer assessment of individual contributions, the distribution of the students marks has markedly widened, and now more reflect the reality of differing team member contributions. This substantial change has occurred with the use of an online tool which supports the development of student evaluation, feedback and review skills when peer assessing individual contributions to large group projects. In use since 2004 the groupwork support tool is called Team Contribution Tracking - TeCTra.