Peerwise - supporting the construction, display and organisation of student contributed assessment questions

I was fortunate last week to attend two stimulating and thought-provoking workshops in Dunedin run by Academy of Tertiary Teaching Excellence member Paul Denny as he introduced PeerWise, a resource developed by Paul and freely available online.

PeerWise leverages the energy of a large class by supporting students in building their own annotated bank of multiple-choice questions. Each question is accompanied by an explanation written by the question author, overall quality and difficult ratings assigned by students who have answered the question, and a forum in which relevant ideas and any misunderstandings are discussed.

When creating the questions, students must reflect on course learning outcomes and must consider possible misconceptions to develop effective alternative answers. Writing explanations requires students to express their understanding of a topic in their own words, and in a way that will be helpful for others. Students can use the ratings assigned by their peers to find good quality questions to answer, and can filter questions by difficulty and topics of interest. When answering questions, students receive immediate feedback that includes the responses of their peers and are challenged to evaluate and critique the question.

PeerWise is freely available online, very easy for instructors to adopt, and has been used in over 125 courses at 21 institutions in 9 countries in a wide range of subject areas.

The 34 Institute of Technology and Polytechnics (ITPs), university and Private Training Establishment (PTE) staff who attended the sessions came from as far afield as Invercargill. There was great interest in the resource as people could see its applicability in their own context.

My thanks go to Helen Dobson, Donna Buckingham and the Otago Academy members for organizing the workshops and for allowing me to attend. I am delighted that Paul has agreed to offer further workshops in the southern region. Invitations will be sent when details are finalized.  (Image: SIT's Sue Kelly, Paul Denny)