Online peer assessment for content and language integrated learning tasks

Staffing constraints at higher education institutions often necessitate that some delivery to undergraduate students in the early years of their degrees is in large groups. This poses problems for academic staff who wish to adopt a Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach, as setting students individual writing or speaking tasks may result in a grading load that is unmanageable. However, recent software developments now mean that online peer assessment is a viable option to provide meaningful feedback to large groups of students on speaking and writing tasks, while also improving students’ understanding of the assessment process. With this in mind, this presentation will report on an action research project to introduce Moodle-based online peer assessment for CLIL tasks at an Englishmedium international university in mainland China. It will firstly describe how online peer assessment was used with a small group of students (N=15) for a Marketing-based writing task, and then analyze how students responded to this, with reference to both questionnaire data and Moodle statistics. Following this, the presenter will outline how online peer assessment has been used with larger groups of students in other disciplines, as well as lessons learned that may be applicable to other contexts