Student Teams Can Be a Powerful Means to Develop Collaboration Skills
Download our PeerAssessment.com Brochure
Taking Student Team Collaboration to a New Level
An online platform for peer assessment of team member participation and contribution
Dear Colleague,
For three decades I’ve beeen facilitating and researching teams, plus teaching IT with student teams at Boise State. I strongly believe that collaborative learning is one of the most powerful pedagogies available for college students. But too frequently, team dynamics poison the experience. Peer Assessments could overcome the problems if students could learn from the feedback, but manually combining that data takes too much time. That experience led me to design PeerAssessment.Com, cutting my workload while helping students to grow their team skills.
PeerAssessment.Com improves student team success in three ways by supporting:
- Individual Accountability for team members (i.e. grading individual contribution)
- Team Dynamics Monitoring by the instructor, who can intervene when necessary
- Rich Peer Feedback for students to improve their team skills
PeerAssessment.Com is peer assessment done right: it automates the peer assessment process, making it easier to hold more frequent peer assessments that return real feedback to students so they can improve their team skills. Prepare a peer assessment for your entire class in under 5 minutes. Then PeerAssessment.Com takes care of the rest; collecting and distributing the feedback to students, plus preparing a grading sheet for you.
Please give PeerAssessment.Com a try, and unlock the potential of your student learning teams.
Dr. Rob Anson
Professor Emeritus of Information Technology Management
College of Business and Economics, Boise State University
Benefits
Efficient
- Set up and run peer assessments in minutes
- Quick copy questions and/or emails from a past class to a new one
- System manages student invites and reminders for you
Flexible
- Ask the questions you want to ask
- Ask peer-team-class level assessment and feedback questions
- Administer on individual department or institutional levels
- Extend assessment periods as needed
Supporting
- Take your pick: Face to Face or Online
- Reorganize teams between assessments
- Support co-instructors and TAs
- Give students something productive to do with their smartphones
Empowering
- Free up instructor time
- Facilitate iterative assessment cycles to monitor and address team dynamics issues
- Create a feedback loop for students to adjust and learn from their own team actions
Reports
- One-click student grading spreadsheet
- Automatically distribute personalized peer feedback to students
- Download data for analysis or research
Testimonials
"The best tool out there to understand how a team is working." ~Dr. Saurabh Gupta, Associate Professor of Information Systems, Kennesaw State University
“”PeerAssessment.Com is a great individual and team tool to improve and acknowledge participation, production levels, personality conflicts and successful project outcomes.
Christy Suciu
Lecturer in Management, Boise State University
“”PeerAssessment.Com has been immensely helpful for my students to give safe and constructive feedback to their team peers, and I appreciate the direct delivery of results to individual students.
Katherine Johnson
Professor of Mathematics, Boise State University
“”Use of PeerAssessment.Com can trigger needed discussions among team members, facilitating the development of shared expectations.
Chris Baughn
Professor of Management, Boise State University
“”PeerAssessment.Com can help discourage social loafing, and if it does occur, students have been empowered to influence the grade outcomes.
Janet Stephens
Lecturer in Managment, Boise State University
“”PeerAssessment.Com is an important instrument for getting quantitative and qualitative data about each student's performance in group work assignments and group discussion boards. I am very thankful that my program is really digging-in to get this kind of data so that students and teachers can reflect upon individuals' behaviors in group situations.
Betty Miller
Manager, Online Faculty/Technology, School of Nursing Boise State University
“”PeerAssessment.Com is an important instrument for getting quantitative and qualitative data about each student's performance in group work assignments and group discussion boards. I am very thankful that my program is really digging-in to get this kind of data so that students and teachers can reflect upon individuals' behaviors in group situations.
Betty Miller
School of Nursing, Boise State University“”PeerAssessment.Com has helped me do a final assessment of individual class participation and major project engagement. It's made a difference in cases where I was not able to determine whether someone who seemed to know it all and who spoke enthusiastically was really the team leader or not. In some cases, that one individual was trying to make up for their lack of earlier participation and engagement in the team project.
Anthony Martinez
Lecturer in Managment, Boise State UniversityAcademic Pricing
(including Institutions and Non-Profits)
Pricing is by the class section, with significant savings if larger quantities are purchased.
- $75 per class section per term
- Can be as low as $38 per class section, based on volume purchased
- Campus site licenses also available for further savings
- Unlimited assessments within a class
- Unlimited number of students within a class
- Up to one year to use the purchased class sections
About Us
PeerAssessment.Com is a product of Hot Rocks Consulting L.L.C., owned by Rob Anson. It was designed by Rob Anson and developed by Aaron Day at Thrive Web Design, in Boise Idaho. This tool would be no more than a bygone dream were it not for Aaron’s artistic and technical genius, let alone his infinite patience.
Dr. Rob Anson has three decades of facilitating and training groups as a consultant as well as a researcher. He just completed 27 years of teaching at Boise State University in Management Information Systems in the College of Business and Economics. While teaching technical topics and capstone project courses, student teams have usually been at the core of his approach. Rob’s background includes extensive consulting and research as a team meeting facilitator, using computerized and traditional techniques to assist hundreds of teams from business, government and nonprofit sectors.
Anson has consulted widely with various groups particularly in the areas of business process modeling, and project management, and has supported or led the implementation of eight campus-wide information systems at Boise State. He has published articles in journals such as Management Science, Journal of Small Group Research, Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, Journal of Educational Computing, and International Journal of Management Education. In addition to his faculty responsibilities at Boise State, Dr. Anson is proud to have served as the first Faculty Ombuds and the first Residential College Faculty in Residence.
PeerAssessment.Com Version 1.0 was hatched in 2009 as a Qualtrics – MS Access prototype, born out of frustration with paper-based peer assessments. In 2011, it was used to design Version 2.0 (nicknamed “PAS”)–a free, fully online version adopted by a growing number of instructors in various disciplines at Boise State and around the country. It became a mainstay for accreditation of programs within Nursing and Business, documenting learning outcomes related to team-skills.
In 2018, Version 3.0 represents a complete rewrite from the ground up. It was able to take advantage of numerous technology advancements to become fully mobile (for student aspects) and accessible. The new design added numerous new features to enhance efficiency for the instructor, provide needed flexibility to customize questions, add functionality to enable multiple instructors and campus-wide administration, plus it established a platform that could be easily and quickly extended.
Resources
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