Summative peer assessment using ‘Turnitin’ and a large cohort of students: a case study

At the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam, the use of peer assessment is increasingly being considered by lecturers that want to give their traditional lecture-based courses a more active learning component. Prins et al. (2005) point out that peer assessment can be very well integrated in such courses and research shows that formative peer assessment results in an increased understanding of the learning content, the development of assessment skills and a reflection on one’s own learning performance (Hamer, Kwong et al. 2005; Prins, Sluijsmans et al. 2005). However, the validity and reliability of peer-generated marks is still under debate (Cho and Schunn 2003). In order to support peer assessment in courses with large cohorts of students, computer support can be regarded as a necessity to manage the whole process of assignment submission and grading. This paper describes a case study on the use of a commercial peer assessment application for summative peer assessment. It describes the course set up, the use of the software and use of the generated marks for summative purposes. The study shows that the system is easy to use for both instructors and students and that it can support large cohorts of students despite some technical problems. The students are very positive about the benefits of peer assessment for their own learning, but they have a low confidence in peer assessment for summative purposes, despite considerable efforts to motivate the students and to build in measures to increase the grade reliability and validity.