The Daily Smirk: A Preliminary Prototype for Continuous Peer Assessment of Team-based Projects

Abstract

Team-based projects are common in many software engineering classes, but come with a host of well-known problems such as social loafing, free-riding, and undesirable team dynamics. To counter these issues, many instructors use peer assessment. Unfortunately, current peer assessment approaches exhibit several limitations, including a typically time-consuming evaluation process, feedback being too infrequent or too late to make a difference for the project, and student ratings being unreliable. In this paper, we introduce the Daily Smirk, a preliminary prototype of a new peer assessment tool that is based on three primary design decisions: (1) peer assessment is continuous throughout the project, (2) assessment is through a lightweight smiley-based rating system, and (3) assessment is normalized around a neutral state so that additional feedback is only needed for outlier ratings. We elaborate on the design of the Daily Smirk and its primary functionality, and report on a preliminary evaluation in a software design course with three team-based projects.