Matching peers and teacher standards in group project : the first-year experience

A variety of assessment tasks as good assessment principles have been adopted as common practice in universities in Hong Kong. It is essential for first-year students to receive feedback on how they perform in the tasks as the expectations and standards required in university programmes are markedly different from schools. Students may receive just-in-time feedback from peers when arranged by teaching faculty. This paper reports a case study of first-year students studying ‘Garment Manufacture’ working on a group project on how individuals provide feedback on peer group performance. The feedback includes qualitative comments with an overall grade. To examine if student judgement over peer group performance matches the standards expected by teaching faculty, the individual grades on each team are totalled and averaged, and compared with the teacher’s grade. As students can benefit from qualitative feedback, we examine the quality of feedback from students. All comments are coded by content, presentation aids (visual and layout), presentation skills and group collaboration; samples of feedback from the top, middle and bottom 10 percent of students are examined on how they appraise the top and bottom two group performances. Recommendations will be made on how students learn from peer feedback.