Challenges of developing engineering students' writing through peer assessment

Developing engineering students' writing should be a key concern but finding space in a content-full curriculum for explicit teaching of writing is problematic. Moreover, providing detailed feedback on writing to large classes is time consuming. To address this problem, peer assessment (PA) was trialled as a means of giving students practice in, and feedback on their writing. The benefits of PA have been extolled as a means of promoting active learning, facilitating students' understanding of marking processes and helping students to make judgements about quality (Falchikov, 2003; Orsmond, 2004; Bloxham and Boyd, 2007). This paper describes our experiences of trialling and embedding PA of written coursework over a two year period (2008-2010) in a School of Engineering and Material Sciences. PA was initially trialled with a medium sized group (56 students), and more recently, with a large first year cohort (280 students). We describe the design and implementation of these trials which were evaluated through observations, focus groups, questionnaires and interviews with tutors and students. Findings from the evaluation data confirmed our assumption that students would develop a better understanding of tutor expectations. Benchmarking their own work against that of their peers, helped students develop an awareness of quality in report writing. An unanticipated benefit of PA, however, was that students reported checking engineering content and conventions in order to give better feedback. Hence, through 'teaching to learn' (Topping, 2005), peer assessors began to develop both their writing and their engineering knowledge. © 2009 Teresa McConlogue, Jens Mueller and Julia Shelton.