Student assessment has been pointed out as one of the aspects of the educational process that require an important reformulation when compared to traditional practices. The guidelines of the European Higher Education Area suggest a more visible implication of the students on their own assessment since it is clear that the future professionals will frequently face situations in which they will be forced to make a judgment on both their own work and their colleagues’ work. In particular, student peer-assessment, which refers to student assessment of other students, has attracted considerable attention in recent years by researchers in the field of Education Sciences. Furthermore, this technique has been proven to be effective for the enhancement of relevant generic competences such as motivation, confidence and ethics. As a consequence, the availability of tools for the implementation of student peer-assessment is of great interest.
The purpose of this work is to evaluate the usability of Internet Groups as an online tool for student peer-assessment in a course of Chemical Process Simulation included in the Chemical Engineering degree at the University of Granada. Among a number of alternatives, Google Groups, which offer free hosting and easy set up, were selected. A Google Group was created and maintained for one academic year. The software as employed by a class of around 90 students. In the Discussions section, topics (or initial posts) could be created along the course by both teachers and students. Then, each topic could be followed by a sequence of posts which may result in an extensive list of responses. Interestingly, each post is not restricted to comprise text only since it is allowed the inclusion of links which can point to accessible documents published with tools such as Google Docs. These documents can consist in full simulation exercises with the code of simulation models and programs as well as the results of such simulations in the form of variable plots. Student peer-assessment was possible since Google Groups allows the rating of post in a scale of 1 to 5 out of 5 points (represented with stars). At the end of the course, the following data related to each student were collected: total number of posts sent, average number of stars received per post, total number of ratings received. These figures, joint with those obtained by assistance lists and computing exams, were employed to calculate a percentage of the final mark for each student in the course.