Xiao,+Y.

=**Xiao, Y., & Lucking, R. (2008). The impact of two types of peer assessment on students' performance and satisfaction within a wiki environment.** =

==The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of two peer assessment methods on university students' academic writing performance and their satisfaction with peer assessment. The results indicate that students in the experimental group demonstrated greater improvement in their writing than those in the comparison group, and the findings reveal that students in the experimental group exhibited higher level of satisfaction with the peer assessment method both in peer assessment structure and peer feedback than those in the comparison group. ==

The current study is intended to answer the following research questions:
 * 1) Will a rating-plus-qualitative-feedback peer assessment method have a greater impact on students' writing performance than a rating-only peer assessment method?
 * 2) What is the effect of a rating-plus-qualitative-feedback peer assessment method on students' satisfaction with the peer assessment method?
 * 3) What is the relationship between student rating (assessment) scores and those rating scores assigned by instructors?
 * 4) What is the reliability of the scores generated by students in the peer assessment from an instructor's perspective?

The literature provided a clear map of the effects on peer assessment of writing and the reliability and validity of peer assessment in writing. Clearly, feedback plays an important role in the students' learning in the peer assessment process, and specific and critical peer feedback may greatly facilitate students improving their writing skills and learning achievement.

Method
The study was intended to determine whether an experimentally-manipulated variable, rating-plus-qualitative-feedback, would result in improvement of student task performance. Data were obtained from two hundred ant thirty-two students at a large eastern urban university, 123 were online students and 109 were on campus students. All participants were divided into two groups according to their academic paper topic choice for a course assignment. The experimental group consisted of 114 students and the control group consisted of 118 students.

In this course, students were asked to participate in a collaborative student authored online text project. The major student assignment was to write an article for inclusion in an oline textbook for the course: Wikibook. In the process of writing the assigned article, students were required to participate in two rounds of peer assessment exercises.

The __first round__ peer assessment started after students completed their first drafts and posted them to the online Wikibook. When students completed first round peer assessment, instructors provided each student with a detailed report of their article's peer ratings to date, including the rating scores for information relevance, information density, information credibility, and clarity/fluency of writing. After, all students were required to revise their articles. When students completed posting their finalized articles to the online Wikibook, the __second round__ began: students must assess their peer's articles, and they were encouraged to rate peer's articles in other groups because all student's articles were combined to constitue the students-authored Wikibook that served as the primary textbook in this course. At the end of the second-round peer assessment, the Student Satisfaction with Peer Assessment Questionnaire was administrated via the Internet to investigate the levels of student's satisfaction with the peer assessment methods that were employed.

The whole peer assessment process for both groups was carried out using Wiki technology.

__ Instruments: __
 * Rubric for Student Academic Papers: information relevance (1-5 points), information density (1-5 points), credibility (1-5 points) and clarity/fluency of article (1-5 points.)
 * Survey questionnaire to compare the extent of student satisfaction between the groups.
 * <span style="color: #231f20; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 90%; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-decoration: none;">The researchers compared the average score of students' second-round peer assessment and the instructor's grading score.
 * <span style="color: #231f20; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 90%; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-decoration: none;">To examinate the reliability of students' rating scores. students' first and second second-round rating scores were analyzed using intraclass correlations.

Conclusions
<span style="color: #231f20; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 90%; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-decoration: none;">The current study examined th effects of two types of peer assessment (quantitative-feedback-only method vs quantitative-plus-qualitative-feddback method) on university students' academic writing performance, students' satisfaction with peer assessment, and the validity and the reliability of student generated rating scores. <span style="color: #231f20; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 90%; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-decoration: none;">This study demonstrates that:
 * <span style="color: #231f20; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 90%; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-decoration: none;">students in the experimental group had greater improvement in their writing than those in the control group
 * <span style="color: #231f20; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 90%; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-decoration: none;">students in the experimental group represent a higher level of satisfaction with the peer assessment method both in terms of the peer assessment structure and peer feedback than those in the control group
 * <span style="color: #231f20; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 90%; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-decoration: none;">majority of students were actively engaged in peer assessment and felt that they benefited both from taking an assessor's and an assessee's role.
 * <span style="color: #231f20; font-family: Times New Roman,serif; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 90%;">using Wiki interactive software and providing an online collaborative learning environment to facilitate peer assessment added value to the peer assessment process.