On-Line Project-Based Peer Assessed Competitions as an Instructional Strategy in Higher Education

Project-based team competition is a well established instructional strategy with a sound constructivist rationale. However the implementation of this strategy in Higher-Education rarely includes socio-constructivist activities such as peer assessments, which have considerable advantages both for assessees and assessors. It seems that the logistics of orchestrating such activities might discourage many instructors. Recent e-learning environments, such as CeLS facilitate the pedagogical planning and remove the logistical burden involved with carrying out peer assessments. The paper describes online peer assessed competitions of team projects in several under-graduate courses and reports students' attitudes toward these activities. High correlations were found between the instructor's grading and those of the students. Peer assessments seemed to provide assessees with candid, rich, and multiple-perspective feedback. Students perceived peer assessments as valid regardless of the grade they received. Most students (72%) reacted favorably to the challenge of exposing their artifacts to peer judgments and believed that as a result of anticipating such judgments they invested more effort and thus improved the quality of their artifacts. Moreover, students’ level of stress was correlated with putting more efforts into the products and feeling that as a result its quality improved.