Badges for Peer Assessment of Teamwork in Organized Education

Team projects and group work have proven to be useful and rewarding educational activities that help students develop important abilities and skills. On the other hand, they have also proven to be difficult to grade in a balanced way which would be perceived as fair by the students. Numerical ratings such as those delivered by the Fink method provide ways to determine the shares of contributions of each individual team member. But such bare numerical evaluation needs also some secondary justification that helps team members to understand why their rating is high or low. Methods to collect such additional feedback often rely on surveys; however, extensive surveys may be perceived as tedious by the students, especially as they need to be filled out for each other team member participating in the team. This may have negative effect on the quality of feedback collected in form of surveys. We present a novel approach to peer assessment of a team-based project exploiting badges that represent individual contributions to the task and teamwork related traits. We show that this approach has positive influence on engagement in peer assessment compared to free-text open questions. We also study if the feedback obtained in this way is informative and to which extent it can serve as replacement for open free-text questions.