Best Research Award 2021

Kindly sponsored by NCFE

Research into formative peer assessment is certainly not a new area of study, however, deploying formative assessment at any reasonable scale has always been challenging, not least because of the additional workload this creates for teachers.
Moreover, traditional efforts around improving student learning and assessment often centre on teachers as the evaluators rather than the students themselves. Typically, the focus is terminal with an emphasis on measuring learning rather than stimulating or promoting learning.
The Learning by Evaluation research project, led by Purdue University in the USA, utilises an innovative online tool called RM Compare, which facilitates assessment for learning at scale through the use of adaptive comparative judgement techniques.
Focus for the project was a group of ~550 undergraduate students enrolled on the same course, where half of the group had the opportunity to evaluate prior cohort work using RM Compare as a primer to their assignment, whereas the other half did not. By engaging the first group with this short learning intervention (~20 minutes), it was found that they developed a stronger understanding of ‘what good looks like’ and significantly improved their attainment.
On-going research is looking at deploying this approach at scale in HE and K-12 contexts

Download the 2021 Best Research and Lifetime Contribution Award Finalists and Winners Brochure