of a teaching activity have been reached, and
• formative evaluation, which is the assessment
whose aim is to guide the students so they will
know how their learning is proceeding and what
they should do to improve it. It is through forma-
tive evaluation that reflection can happen.
Often summative evaluation will take the form of
a formal examination. On the other hand, formative
evaluation will be part of the learning process. One
can therefore seek to incorporatea notion of formative
evaluation as part of teaching activities, and this is
where peer assessment comes in.
The claims that Lauv˚as and Jakobsen make are
(Lauv˚as and Jakobsen, 2002): If formative evaluation
is thorough and if one insists that the students make a
substantial effort throughout the course, the students
will learn much more and will remember the material
much better and for a longer period of time. The exam
itself will become a different experience for students,
since they will be examined on the basis of material
with which they are already well acquainted and feel
that they master. Lauv˚as uses the analogy of athletes
that practice regularly and are told by their coach how
to improve their performance.
Lauv˚as and Maugesten have experimented with
methods for restructuring teaching via peer assess-
ment (Maugesten and Lauv˚as, 2004). The activities
have been laid out such that all students would explic-
itly need to adopt a ‘Susan’-style learning strategy.
1.3 Existing Solutions
There has already been a fair amount of work on au-
tomating the administrative aspect of the peer assess-
ment strategy.
Michael de Raadt has created a peer review mod-
ule (de Raadt, ) that can be used with Moodle (Moo-
dle, ). One limitation of this module is that peer
reviews take the form of a series of multiple-choice
questions for which boxes are to be ticked. Other
forms of assessment are not possible.
In a series of papers, Joy and Sitthiworachart have
focused on how to use web-based peer assessment to
assist deep learning in programming classes (Sitthi-
worachart and Joy, 2004; Ward et al., 2004). In this
work, they have among other things, focused on ask-
ing the students to comment on specific aspects of so-
lutions to programming exercises. Their results indi-
cate that web-based peer assessment can indeed assist
in the process of deep learning.
1.4 Our Setting
We have developed and used an experimental system
for peer assessment used in the course Syntax and Se-
mantics taught at our university. Our goal has been
to gain experience in how to increase student efforts
and improve learning through web-based methods for
peer assessment. We have based the design of our
system on previous, largely paper-based strategies for
peer assessment.
2 PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE
From 2004 to 2007, the first author has experimented
with methods of peer assessment in another theory
course on computability and complexity theory.
A questionnaire-based survey has shown that, in
the past, a student would spend only 30 minutes
preparing for a course session. While peer assess-
ment dramatically increased student efforts, the solu-
tion was entirely paper-based and this required a sig-
nificant effort of all involved. The incentive for stu-
dents was that the participating students would have a
reduced syllabus at the oral exam.
The assessment expected of students involved that
of reviewing the solutions to textbook-style problems
solved by their fellow students. Here, the problem
turned out to be one of greatly varying levels of un-
derstanding: students that had difficulting solving a
problem were often unable to provide meaningful re-
views. Quite often, our conversations with students
during commenting sessions revealed that the student
had not read the relevant pages of the course textbook.
Finally, some ‘Robert’-students very consistently
handed in ‘non-solutions’ in which they simply wrote
that they could not solve the problems that had been
stated. These same students would also write very
brief reviews of solutions. As they had handed in so-
lutions and participated in the commenting process
and thereby followed the formal procedures, it was
hard to argue that they should not have a reduced
exam syllabus even if they had done little actual work.
3 THE CURRENT COURSE
The course Syntax and Semantics is found at the
4th semester of the undergraduate programmes in
Computer Science and in Software Technology. The
course covers formal language theory and program-
ming language theory.
The course consists of 15 4-hour sessions, divided
into 15 practical sessions of 2 hours each and a 90
minute lecture. At the same semester, there were three
other courses of 3 ECTS each and an 18 ECTS stu-
dent project. As the students collaborate on projects
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