G-PAT: A Group Peer Assessment Tool to Support Group Projects

Abstract

Peer assessment is a type of assessment that allows students in taking their initiative to manage their study under the supervision of their peers to achieve the learning outcome. Students constantly need to reflect on themselves to understand the progress they made and what learning aspects they are currently lacking. As learning is a step-by-step process, therefore to achieve better consistency and learning experience, educational institutions are slowly transitioning summative learning to the combination of both formative and summative learning. Assessment is used to evaluate the progress of learning. However, existing peer assessment tool has limitation. It is unable to fit into all the use cases for different subjects. Moreover, the biasness of the instructor or peers has caused some of the students facing discrimination when doing the peer assessments. Integration of both formative and summative assessment into the peer assessment system could help instructors better understanding their students through feedback provided hence could improve learning strategies. In this paper, the authors proposed a web application, G-PAT, a peer assessment tool that enhances the flexibility of the template of the existing systems to cater different use cases. The SPA and SAPA factors from SPARKLUS are used in the calculation of performance and feedback of the students. The implementation results of G-PAT have shown that more than 90% of the students agree that the tool helps them to evaluate their performance and they are willing to continue to reuse it as their learning companion.