Peer assessment (PA) is widely implemented in higher education, and it can play an important role in online learning by connecting students to their peers and enabling feedback from multiple sources. However, high-quality feedback is not guaranteed. And students tend not to use peer feedback. Preparing for, designing, and implementing PA can be…

The rate of transition to online instruction in higher education was accelerated by the new reality of the global pandemic, COVID-19. As a result, faculty must adapt by being more efficient to manage more students with less resources and even less personal contact for the foreseeable future. Efficiency can be gained by using group assignments and…

The method of normalisation combined with peer ratings is utilised to provide the solution to the biased rating problem of mapping group work marks to individual marks. We critically evaluate the method of normalisation following the findings of an article which argued against the use of self and/or peer rating mechanism. We demonstrate that the…

Quantitative Reasoning for Professionals is a two-semester general education sequence that teaches basic and intermediate algebra through the lens of quantitative reasoning. In this course sequence, we emphasize communication and inference-making while teaching practical algebra skills for students in programs such as business, nursing, and social…

The accuracy and consistency of peer marking, particularly when students have the power to reward (or penalise) during formative and summative assessment regimes, is largely unknown. The objective of this study is to evaluate students' ability and behaviour in marking their peers' teamwork performance in a collaborative group assessment context…

Students at two universities were surveyed in order to determine if past experiences with classroom group work impacted attitudes about this pedagogical technique. Questions related to equitable distribution of effort (personal and of other group members), impact on learning and life skills, group structure, and fairness in grading. Business and…

The issue of group learning has become an even greater concern in recent years as more college and university professors have begun to incorporate specific group assignments (i.e., assignments which require that students meet as a group and equally contribute to a final product) into their class requirements. The purpose of the present descriptive…

The University of Pennsylvania's doctoral chemistry curriculum has included a required course in chemical information since 1995. Twenty years later, the course has evolved from a loosely associated series of workshops on information resources to a holistic examination of the chemical literature and its place in the general research process. The…

An assignment incorporating posters into a second-year analytical chemistry lab is described. Students work in groups and are assigned one of the application-themed weekly laboratories as a topic. Course data acquired for these weekly laboratories are compiled into spreadsheets that the poster group then analyzes to present in an on-campus poster…

This study investigates cooperativeness, assertiveness, group satisfaction, leader grade, and leadership negotiation in a collaborative assignment conducted in a small group. Researchers manipulated the assignment of team members who reported on measures of group satisfaction and original scales of assertiveness and cooperativeness. Respondents…

This is a case study of how a capstone course, Producing and Directing, evolved into a service-learning course designed to provide graduating students with real-world workplace experience. It will examine issues including course structure, grading issues, course and client logistics, unaddressed skill sets, group work, and work-product quality…

Professors often give members of a group project the same grade or they use peer evaluations to provide individualized grades. Unfortunately, both these methods have shortcomings. This article describes the segment manager method (SMM), a method for assigning individualized grades on the group project that does not rely on peer evaluations. A…

A capstone course is often synthetic, bringing together many components of a student's educational background. For this reason, a project-based course in mathematical modeling makes a great capstone, as modeling problems often require a broad collection of mathematical tools for their solution. The addition of a service-learning component can…

In the conventional classroom, many obstacles hinder interaction between an instructor and students, such as limited class hours, fixed seating, and inadequate time for meetings after class. This work develops a novel multimedia mobile classroom feedback system (MMCFS) that instantly displays students' responses, such as class-related questions or…

Although group work is commonly used in university-level instruction, social loafing, domineering team members, poor attenders, and inequitable distribution of marks have been identified as obstacles to team-based learning. Peer evaluation has been proposed as one vehicle to address these issues. For use in grading, peer evaluations are often…