First PeerWise activity in Physics 1A

Our first PeerWise activity in Physics1A this year has just ended. Once again, our students have produced some fantastic questions with real insight and creativity on display.

We took quite  a lot of time in the lectures to remind students to start well ahead of the deadline, to avoid the usual ski-slope profile of questions and answers coming in minutes before the final deadline. It looks like that worked as the graphs below show, with highest activities recorded prior to deadline day.

Another interesting thing that we found was that there looks to be a fairly clear linear relationship between when you get started on the assignment and the final assignment score. The graph below is based on sampling a fraction of all assignment marks.

Draft project plan now online

Our draft project plan is now available on the wiki, ahead of the first meeting of all projects funded in the Assessment and Feedback theme. And the project poster we produced, showing examples of student work from our pilot implementation of PeerWise last year, is included below.

Poster for JISC meeting 5th Oct

And then there were more

We've been giving talks about our pilot use of PeerWise in first year physics courses, that really acted as the seed for this project. (The slides from one of these, at the Physics Higher Education Conference in Sept 2011, are embedded below).

Student generated content for enhanced engagement and learning

View more presentations from Physics Education Research group, University of Edinburgh

We've managed to hook up with colleagues from other institutions who are also implementing PeerWise in their courses and they will be joining us as project associates. As well as expanding the coverage, they'll serve as useful routes to disseminating our findings as well.

Details of all the courses that we are implementing PeerWise in are now up on the project wiki.