Moodle in English: Student Self-Assessment (again)

Hi.

A couple of years later, and I find myself trying to solve the same problem that I was trying to solve in 2019. That problem is the ability of students to self-assess their work. I wrote about Student Self-Assessement on the Moodle Forums, and my blog - TroyPatterson.me, but never really found a great answer.

I have a teacher who has created a Google Spreadsheet and shared that through Google Classroom (so each student gets a unique copy). This "kind of works" but ends up with multiple copies of the same spreadsheet and is overwhelming to manage.

It "seems" like Moodle should be able to handle this easily, but I still can't find a great, easy to implement answer.

Any new thoughts?

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Marcus Green - Tuesday, 9 November 2021, 5:33 PM

It's an honorable quest you are on. Here are some of my thoughts on peer/autmarking
https://www.slideshare.net/MarcusGreen17/automated-and-peer-assessment-mootieuk18
Apologies for the ads that make slideshare unusable/obnoxious. Need an alternative.

If you have a grandmother who has yet to master the art of sucking eggs....

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Troy Patterson - Tuesday, 9 November 2021, 10:55 PM

Great to hear from you. As you know, I appreciate the great things that you've developed.

I'm really hoping that I can figure something out, or identify something that exists. I keep seeing lots of "self-assessment is a powerful tool", but I'm really not finding a powerful example of how to do it easily. Everything seems over complicated for the teacher and the student.

Cheers.

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Randy Thornton - Wednesday, 10 November 2021, 1:23 AM

Troy,

Thanks for bringing this up again: it's a real missing piece.

There was a discussion some time ago (which I can't seem to locate at the moment) about the issues with Workshop and groups and individuals. There's some tracker items seeking improvements to Workshop so that the "phases" could be group and individual aware instead of an "everyone or nothing" approach. Ideally, that could turn Workshop into a viable self assessment tool where an "individual mode" could allow them to assess themselves.

But those requests have been outstanding for a long time now with little to no movement.

Meanwhile, I think the only hope would be a new activity module plugin. This would certainly make a good MUA project. The various workarounds and partial solutions out there (like Tim Hunt's question type) work in specific cases but don't really add up to what is needed.

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Mary Cooch - Wednesday, 10 November 2021, 1:36 AM

Just popping up to say that I agree that it would be great if Workshop could be improved to improve self assessment.

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Randy Thornton - Wednesday, 10 November 2021, 2:13 AM

Mary,

Perhaps then someone in the MUA could propose sponsoring those various improvements to Workshop to get group and individual modes added to it.

Here's a Meta item from the Tracker that covers some of the suggestions: https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-43280 but I think on "Team mode" is also important: https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-35594 and https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-41400, (and this issue too: https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB-6531.)

None of those explicitly address what Troy is after, but if work was done on the groups then adding an individual mode would not be a leap to add in.

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Marcus Green - Wednesday, 10 November 2021, 10:16 PM

"Everything seems over complicated for the teacher and the student."
A hundred years ago (or similar) Michael De Raadt developed a lovely peer assessment thing that normal people could use, sadly it did not get updated. If someone had a copy and some time/money it could be bought back to life. Once a thing is invented, making it work with a much later version of moodle is usually fairly easy.

Update

found and forked it

https://github.com/marcusgreen/moodle-mod_peerreview

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Mary Cooch - Wednesday, 10 November 2021, 10:54 PM

Wow Marcus - I had forgotten about that. Now we just need someone, some time and some money

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Marcus Green - Thursday, 11 November 2021, 12:16 AM

"someone, some time and some money"
It's a bit like the choice of Good, Fast or Cheap, pick two.

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Randy Thornton - Thursday, 11 November 2021, 1:32 AM

Yes, wow! As Mary says. I think it would certainly be less effort to do that - and have a better interface - than updating Workshop.

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Deds Castillo - Thursday, 11 November 2021, 1:47 PM

Does anyone have any saved screenshots of how this looks like? This could be of use to some of our clients and if I can get a general idea I can gauge whether some of the devs from my team would like to update it.

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Marcus Green - Thursday, 11 November 2021, 4:52 PM

I installed this fork "out of the box" on Moodle 3.10
https://github.com/tunele/moodle-mod_peerreview

That version is 5 years old as against the original which is 7 years old/ish.

I also installed and tweaked the original version on Moodle 3.11
https://github.com/marcusgreen/moodle-mod_peerreview
By installed I mean, no smoke came out of the wires, no obvious error messages when I gave it the two minute outing.

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by AL Rachels - Friday, 12 November 2021, 12:49 AM

I just installed your github version and started testing. I was able to set up an activity using file uploads (docx) submission format, but when I try to set up the submission format to online text, it fails due to: Error writing to database, and the debug trace starts as: Debug info: Field 'maxbytes' doesn't have a default value.
With a few student submissions, if the teacher or an admin goes to the Peer Review > Submissions tab then clicks on Review for one of the students submissions, it also gives multiple errors in the mark.php file.
Unfortunately, I just don't have the time to "play" with it anymore as I have one of my own plugins for which I have been procrastinating on some major updates that I need to finish working on.

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Randy Thornton - Friday, 12 November 2021, 1:39 AM

Al,

I got the very same error. The database table is clearing missing the maxbytes field setup. It probably just needs a DEFAULT="0" or some such in the install.xml to fix that. When I fix it manually in the database that way, the plugin loads and works as expected... until

When click the Submissions tab (and there are no submissions yet) I get

Exception - Class 'Object' not found

Debug info:
Error code: generalexceptionmessage

Stack trace:

line 485 of /mod/peerreview/locallib.php: Error thrown
line 85 of /mod/peerreview/submissions.php: call to get_review_statistics()

Fix appears to be to update that to use stdClass instead, as per guidelines.

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Randy Thornton - Friday, 12 November 2021, 1:47 AM

Marcus,

Would you like to move this part of the conversation over to the github pages? I would be interested in trying this out and helping to do some testing on it, at least to line up some of the issues appearing, for whoever may pick this up in the future. Which place is the best to do that?

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Marcus Green - Friday, 12 November 2021, 3:05 AM

Which branch? was thinking of deleting my own current fork and replacing it with a fork of this as it is 2 years later...
https://github.com/tunele/moodle-mod_peerreview

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by AL Rachels - Friday, 12 November 2021, 5:33 AM

I would use a fork of the newer code. I have a Moodle 3.3 site for testing, and so far, this new code is working perfectly with the activity set up to use online text.
I need to replace the code I have in my Moodle 3.11.4 dev site and see how it performs there.

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Marcus Green - Friday, 12 November 2021, 4:16 PM

I have switched my repo to the Moodle 3.3 version (5 years old), and it seemed to install without showing errors on the Alpha version of Moodle 4.0. with debug set to developer.

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Marcus Green - Friday, 12 November 2021, 5:14 PM

Ahh I just found one trivial missing string, easy to fix
"String [grade,core] is deprecated. Either you should no longer be using that string, or the string has been incorrectly deprecated, in which case you should report this as a bug. Please refer to https://docs.moodle.org/dev/String_deprecation"
Put your hands in the air if you think a user tour would enhance this plugin?

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by AL Rachels - Saturday, 13 November 2021, 12:28 AM

My hands are up.
Haven't tried in Moodle 4.0 code yet. As time permits I am jumping forward in old Moodles and am currently working on Moodle 3.6.

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Randy Thornton - Wednesday, 17 November 2021, 7:42 AM

Same here. I just see 4.0 as still moving around a bit much.

In 3.11, I am not seeing any errors with full dev debugging on. Nice work, Marcus!

I am not really sure how this works, so, yeah, I will need a tour too for the teacher... I can give it a bit more of a test in a day or two.

So, back to Troy's question then, how would this be set up for a Student to self review. I notice right away that it complained when my test course had less than five students enrolled in it. So, it is clearly checking on those numbers to get the "peer" part to be solid. How would it be set up for a student to both submit and review their own submission??

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Randy Thornton - Wednesday, 17 November 2021, 8:04 AM

There's no Group setting for it that I can see.

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Troy Patterson - Saturday, 13 November 2021, 1:33 AM

This is totally awesome. Thanks so much for all your assistance on this. Warms my heart!

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Marcus Green - Thursday, 18 November 2021, 7:37 AM

Has anyone in this thread experimented further with Peer review? Anyone considering using it with students?

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Mary Cooch - Thursday, 18 November 2021, 3:14 PM

I'll do my best to install it and try it out over the weekend - although I'm a bit Workshop fan, I am very curious about this.

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Marcus Green - Thursday, 18 November 2021, 5:26 PM

I like what I see so far, and It seems to work as expected.

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by AL Rachels - Friday, 19 November 2021, 1:13 AM

Hi everyone,

Took me a while to get back to this and I'll post me results down below.

@Mary, if you want to save yourself the time and trouble to install, just go to http://www.drachels.com/moodle311/login/index.php. The log in info is on the login page. The Peer Review activity is in the, Diary Development, course in the bottom of the first Topic section.

The, Peer Review, mostly works in every Moodle from 3.3 to the Moodle 4.0dev+ (Build: 20211116), code. There is not enything I have found that "breaks" it so that it is not usable.

Seems to work fine in Moodle 3.3 without any discrepancies.

Can't check M3.4 and M3.5 right now as I don't have a low enough version of PHP on the server at the moment.

In Moodle 3.6 on the Analysis tab, the footer underlaps and overlaps the page. i.e. the footer background is behind, or underlaps, the page info and all the footer data info overlaps the peerreview page information starting at Feedback Attention.

In Moodle 3.7 on the Analysis tab, the footer underlaps and overlaps the page. i.e. the footer background is behind, or underlaps, the page info and all the footer data info overlaps the peerreview page information starting at Feedback Attention. Seems to work okay for student submission and review.

Moodle 3.8 on the Analysis tab, the footer underlaps and overlaps the page. i.e. the footer background is behind, or underlaps, the page info and all the footer data info overlaps the peerreview page information starting at Feedback Attention. Seems to work okay for student submission and review.

Moodle 3.9 on the Analysis tab, the footer underlaps and overlaps the page. i.e. the footer background is behind, or underlaps, the page info and all the footer data info overlaps the peerreview page information starting below, Criteria. Seems to work okay for student submission and review.

Moodle 3.10 on the Analysis tab, the footer underlaps and overlaps the page. i.e. the footer background is behind, or underlaps, the page info and all the footer data info overlaps the peerreview page information starting below, Criteria. Seems to work okay for student submission and review.

In Moodle3.11.4+ (3dev) On the Submissions tab, the teacher and admin get user_picture::fields() is deprecated. Please use the \core_user\fields API instead, and String [grade,core] is deprecated. Either you should no longer be using that string, or the string has been incorrectly deprecated, in which case you should report this as a bug. Please refer to https://docs.moodle.org/dev/String_deprecation.
On the Analysis tab, the footer underlaps and overlaps the page. i.e. the footer background is behind, or underlaps, the page info and all the footer data info overlaps the peerreview page information starting at Criteria. Seems to work okay for student submission and review.

In Moodle3.11.4+ (www.drachels.com/moodle31) while installing the acitivity on the settings page got the, String [grade,core] is deprecated, debug message. Got the same deprecation message when saving the settings. On the Submissions tab, has the same two errors as my 3dev site. On the Analysis tab, the footer underlaps and overlaps the page. i.e. the footer background is behind, or underlaps, the page info and all the footer data info overlaps the peerreview page information starting at Criteria. Seems to work okay for student submission and review.

Moodle 4.0 When you go back to the settings page after the activity has been created, you will get the, String [grade,core] is deprecated, debug message. When you save the activity after editing the settings, you get the, String [grade,core] is deprecated, debug message. On the Submissions tab, has the same two errors as my 3dev site. On the Analysis tab, it does NOT have the underlap/overlap error, but works as it should.

Note that when the teacher reviews and enters comments regarding the students work and then creates Pre-saved Comments and hits the, Save changes, button, the teacher review comments and checkmarks will be lost! So need to create the Pre-saved Comments and save them first, before working on the actual review.

Note that, Pre-saved comments, are save in the mdl_peerreview table, in the savedcomments field. There does not appear to be a place where the teacher has the option of adding them ahead of time. Can only add them while reviewing a student entry.

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Troy Patterson - Friday, 19 November 2021, 1:46 AM

This is terrific. Thanks for the comprehensive write-up. I have installed it on site running 3.9 (one of my test environments). Things seem to work well for the original design of the activity. For Peer review, it has some nice features. Being the cranky old guy, (and hopeful, optimistic), I'd love to see a few changes:
- A rubric instead of basic criteria (the rubric model in Workshop is awesome)
- The ability of the student to complete the rubric along with the submission

The rubric model in Workshop is much easier to create for teachers. It is much easier to use. That fits well with the practice of utilizing rubrics. Ease of use is pretty important to teachers. Creating multiple criterion with lots of typing of the same things over and over is a such a turn off for teachers that it would limit the use.

Thanks so much to everyone who has taken an interest in this. Student self-assessment is a powerful practice AND a huge gaping digital hole right now.

Thanks.

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Marcus Green - Friday, 19 November 2021, 1:52 AM

I have fixes for the deprecated bits in this branch
https://github.com/marcusgreen/moodle-mod_peerreview
And I will investigate the pre-saved comments thing. I had just got around to exploring the comments bit.

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Mary Cooch - Friday, 19 November 2021, 3:20 PM

Thanks very much for this Al. It will be my weekend Moodling

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Vardaan S. Rathore - Monday, 22 November 2021, 6:24 PM

Hello Mary!

How was your weekend :P Were you able to look into the plugin?

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Troy Patterson - Friday, 19 November 2021, 1:56 AM

Hi Mary.

I'm a bit Workshop fan as well. I see this as a different use case (though some of the ideas could also be utilized within Workshop). I would like to see this open up the possibility for students to self-assess upon turning something in.

Self-Assessment would not need to be limited to peer editing with this module. Rather the student could self-assess a physical assignment, a piece of writing, etc. Additionally, the teacher may choose to NOT to have other students assess each other. Rather the student could self-assess and then the teacher could assess. There could then be a conversation about the assessment and why.

Workshop is extremely regimented. All of the students have to make a submission and the teacher has to move to the next phase in order for assessment to happen. This creates a lag between turning in and self-assessing. Delayed self-assessment can also be powerful, but that is an additional use case. I do love the rubric creation and use within Workshop.

I think that there is plenty of room for these methodologies. In fact, I believe that they would complement each other.

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by AL Rachels - Friday, 19 November 2021, 10:06 PM

Hi Troy,

The site I mention for Peer Review above is not my primary site for development work, but if you look in the same course you will notice Diary activities. If you look at them, you will see that I am working my way to having each diary entry automatically assessed. Eventually, I hope to also have it automatically check for words and phrases.

Due to a recent request, I have even added code so that a site admin, can transfer Journal activity entries into a Diary. I will try to make sure today that my latest code for Diary is installed as well as the changes to Peer Review that Marcus has implemented.

By the way, if you self register you will get the emails generated for your work in the plugins. Otherwise, all the emails for the teachers and students come directly to me.

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Troy Patterson - Thursday, 2 December 2021, 1:50 AM

Ok. So I've been thinking even more about rubrics and student assessment. I'm still searching for a way for students to have a "clickable", easy to use Rubric that would go along with an Assignment that they are completing.

However, I'm also seeing several other uses for rubrics:
- It would be terrific if students could also complete a rubric as feedback. Students could listen to a presentation, or review a poster, or a project, and complete a rubric that would provide feedback. For example, the teacher creates an assignment/link, etc and the students provide feedback on that linked item.
- Since I work with teachers frequently too, I'd love them to self-reflect on a lesson and complete a rubric
- Having teachers rate different PD options on a rubric

Honestly, I'm not finding a good alternative that actually looks and acts like a rubric. Sure, one could use the Google Forms and have that flow to a spreadsheet. Then, one could create a graph. Then copy that to a spreadsheet for each student and filter by student so that each student only sees his/her/their own results. That's a nightmare to manage.

The teacher view of the rubric and response is perfect. However, getting that duplicated into the students view is proving tough.

Thanks.

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by AL Rachels - Thursday, 2 December 2021, 4:59 AM

Hmmm, sounds like you are describing a new activity, or modified capabilities for the current assignment with rubric activity.

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Joost Elshoff - Thursday, 2 December 2021, 6:14 PM

Though not running as a plugin in Moodle, FeedbackFruits seems to be doing most of what you describe. And... the integrate nicely over LTI: https://feedbackfruits.com/en (I don't own shares or anything in this company, but I like their take on providing feedback).

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Dave Sherwin - Friday, 3 December 2021, 2:50 AM

Troy - for some of the uses of Rubrics for students to provide feedback our speech teachers have been using Helen Foster suggestion to use the Workshop activity to score other students live (permalink). It really was rather easy for setting up Using Workshop activity because the students only entered the title of their speech in the Submission phase and the Assessment phase was using a Rubric that students could score the live speech. The students did get to see the rubric feedback once the Grading Evaluation phase was closed.
In fact the Teacher also created an offline assignment module so the students did not have submit an assignment but view their performance teacher feedback scoring with advanced grading rubric. So the student had the teacher feedback before they got back to their seat.

Found some other suggestions beside using the Workshop for scoring students live.
Moodle in English: Creating a rubric for students to grade other students live

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Re: Student Self-Assessment (again)

by Troy Patterson - Thursday, 9 December 2021, 3:48 AM

I haven't installed this yet, it hasn't been updated in a few years, but this looks like exactly what I am looking for:

https://github.com/pddring/moodle-rubric-self-assessment

It works off of one rubric. The teacher sees what the student completed. The teacher marks up the "same" rubric. Both grades can go into the gradebook. From the example given:

*"Coloured in green is the grade the teacher has chosen. A green border shows what the student has said they think they're working at"*

Description

This is a plugin for moodle that allows students to perform a self assessment on any assignment that uses a rubric advanced grading grid.

Rubrics (marking grids) allow students to quickly see how their work will be graded, how marks have been awarded and how they can improve. They also speed up the process of awarding marks.

This plugin extends the builtin rubric features in moodle to allow students to use the same rubric that the teacher uses in order to self assess their work. Their self assessments are then visible to the teacher who grades their work which can speed up or inform the marking process as well as informing the teacher who is over/under confident with their work.

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