A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

The visual arts
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CASPAR could provide a space where students could meet ‘virtually’ to
resolve issues.
• CASPAR was felt by most students to be easy to access and use, and to have
helped them learn about being a good group member.
• Students wrote fair and honest feedback about each other, usually attributing
lower marks to themselves than to their peers.
• Although students could not agree on the weighting of peer assessment
criteria, ‘reliability to carry out allocated roles’ was deemed the most
important overall.
• Students really valued reading honest opinions about their performance from
their peers, but were uncomfortable about writing it down.
• Students unanimously agreed that peer assessment should take place at
multiple points over a project, and not just at the end, to allow them to reflect
and change their practice.
The use of peer assessment throughout the project, rather than only at the end,
was key to this study. The more feedback the student has, and the more often, the
greater the opportunity to reflect, learn and evolve. Every student in the pilot
expressed a preference for assessment throughout, not just at the end.
Marking and providing feedback is usually the work of a tutor, and ongoing
assessment of this type would normally mean considerably more tutor work.
CASPAR peer assessment involved little or no time from the tutor’s perspective,
and gave the students themselves some ownership in awarding marks and
comments, and enabled learning through that process.
CASPAR has been further developed following the findings of the pilot and will
soon be available for other institutions to use. Continuing investigations and
piloting of the system in different scenarios will continue to improve it as we
learn more about how students interact with it as a learning tool.
(Andrew Ireland, Subject Leader for Television Production,
Bournemouth University, National Teaching Fellow 2004)
Interrogating practice
Think about the assessment processes you have experienced as a tutor and
as a student. How involved were students in assessment?
What was the formative assessment which had most impact on you when
you were a student?