Effects of Group and Task Size in Computer Supported Collaborative Marking

Despite the well-known value of collaboration in highly subjective tasks and the support that technology can be provide in such tasks, there has been little discussion on the possibilities of Computer Supported Collaborative Marking as part of the broader Technology Enhanced Assessment. We argue that the marking process can be thought as a collaborative task, one in which markers collaborate towards a common goal: To produce a high quality marking work, i.e. An excellent inter-rater agreement and quality formative feedback. This paper contributes the design and implementation of collaborative features within an eMarking tool and its experimental evaluation within a collaborative marking task. Nine configurations of group and task sizes were evaluated. Results showed that the collaborative marking process using an eMarking tool was of high quality, and a particular setting, 4 markers using a 25% overlap level task size, showed the most efficient process. Another important result was the emergence of two different collaborative patterns within the markers' groups.