CREPS AND THE STREBER-APP AN INTERACTIVE METHOD FOR COMPETENCE-ORIENTED ASSESSMENT AND ITS DIGITAL IMPLEMENTATION

Abstract

"Competence orientation and individualization are paradigms that are becoming increasingly important in modern education. However, especially in courses with many participants the implementation of competence-oriented teaching and assessing quickly exceeds the limits of the lecturer’s time resources. Peer evaluation is generally suitable for giving students individual and comprehensive feedback, at least if the quality of the feedback is high enough. Unfortunately, sometimes it's hard to motivate students to give high-quality feedback. The CREPS (Create, Review, Enhance, Practice and Score) method was created by the authors in early 2020. It offers an organizational framework that can be used regardless of the size of the student group without significantly increasing the effort for the lecturers. The focus is placed on the skills of self-evaluation and peer assessment, which are both important for competence orientation. The basic idea includes an iterating process in which students generate and enhance test questions based on the given learning content that are assessed and evaluated by their colleagues for quality, correctness, and complexity level. In addition, the best questions are selected for further practicing. Students are rewarded with points for each step in this process; highly appreciated work (good questions and valued feedback) will result in higher scores. This method and the Streber-App, a mobile application supporting the method, were originally developed for a media technology related university course and since then have been used in six courses in 2020, 2021 and 2022. To evaluate the method CREPS and the supporting app as well as to find out the students' views on and experiences with both method and application, more than 500 students were invited to participate in a quantitative survey. This paper presents the method CREPS, its underlying didactic considerations, the implementation with the mobile app and the most interesting results from the survey. The participants reflected these concepts and their acceptance in the learning setting. The students’ feedback on the use of the method, the support by the lecturers and the concrete implementation using our app, allows us to draw conclusions about the functioning of the previous application and possible improvement for further use. The self-assessment of the students on their individual learning success gives an indication of the benefits of the method in the university environment."