The role of peer assessment in education has become of particular interest in recent years, mainly because of its potential benefits in improving student’s learning and benefits in time management by allowing teachers and tutors to use their time more efficiently to get the results of student’s assessments quicker. Peer assessment has also relevant in the context of distance learning and massive open online courses (MOOCs). The discipline of architecture is dominated by an artistic language that has its own way of being discussed and applied. The architecture project analysis and criticism goes beyond the technical compon- ents and programme requirements that need to be fulfilled. Dominating the architecture language is an essential tool in the architect’s toolbox. In this context peer assessment activities can help them develop skills early in their undergraduate education. In this work we show how peer assessment acts as a formative activity in architecture teaching. Peer assessment leads the students to develop critical and higher order thinking processes that are fundamental for the analysis of architecture projects. The applicability of this strategy to massive open online education systems has to be considered as the heterogeneous and unsupervised environment requires confidence in the usefulness of this approach. To study this we designed a local experiment to investigate the role of peer experiment in architecture teaching. This experiment showed that students reacted positively to the peer assessment exercise and looked forward to participating when it was announced. Previously to the assessment students felt engaged by the responsibility of marking their colleagues. Subsequently to the first iteration of the peer assessment, professors registered that students used elements of the qualitative assessment in their architecture discourse, and tried to answer the criticisms pointed to their projects by their colleagues. This led their work in directions some hadn’t considered before. The marks awarded by the students are in good agreement with the final scores awarded by the professors. Only in 5 cases the average score of the peer assessment differed more than 10% from marks given by the professors. It was also observed that the professor’s marks where slightly higher than the average of the peer marking. No correlation was observed between the marks given by a student as marker and the final score given to that student by the professors. The data produced in this experiment shows peer assessment as a feedback mechanism in the construction of a critical thought process and in the development of an architectural discourse. Also it shows that students tend to mark their colleagues with great accuracy. Both of these results are of great importance for possible application of peer assessment strategies to massive open online courses and distance education.

1. PEER ASSESSMENT
IN
ARCHITECTURE
EDUCATION
DAVID SOUSA-RODRIGUES1
MAFALDA TEIXEIRA DE SAMPAYO2
CRISTIAN JIMENEZ-ROMERO1
JEFFREY H. JOHNSON1
1 THE OPEN UNIVERSITY, UK
2 LISBON UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE, PT

2. OBJECTIVES
Make 2nd year architecture students develop a critical
thinking process about Architecture Projects.
Improve quality of their work by providing more and varied
feedback.
Evaluate the applicability of peer assessment in the
classroom.
Evaluate the students critical thinking as part of their
cognitive skills.

3. CONTEXT

4. ARCHITECTURE
PEDAGOGY
“Peer assessment develops skills for lifelong learning.”
in Changing Architectural Education
Assessment focus in studio: What is most prominent in Architecture, art
1
and design?
Barbara de la Harpe*1, J. Fiona Peterson2, Noel Frankham3, Robert Zehner4, Douglas
Neale5, Elizabeth Musgrave6, Ruth McDermott7
1Design and Social Context, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
2School of Creative Media, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
3Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia
4Faculty of the Built Environment, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
5, 6School of Geography Planning & Architecture, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia
7Learning and Teaching Unit, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
*GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne, Vic 3001, Australia.
Email: barbara.delaharpe@rmit.edu.au
Barbara de la Harpe
BSc, BSc (Hons), Grad Dip Ed, PhD
Barbara de la Harpe is Dean Academic Development in the Design and Social Context
Portfolio at RMIT University. For over 15 years she has been involved in teaching and
academic professional development in higher education. Her background is in Science
Education and Educational Psychology and her fields of expertise include learning;
generic skill development university change management; and teacher professional
development. Her PhD study was on student learning and she is widely published in
learning and teaching.
J. Fiona Peterson
DipBus, TTTC, MEd (Teaching), PhD
Fiona Peterson is Director of Learning and Teaching in the School of Creative Media at
RMIT University. She has 29 years’ experience as a teacher and educational facilitator
spanning high school, vocational education and training, as well as undergraduate and
postgraduate higher education programs. Her background is in Communication Studies
and she has a PhD in collaborative learning networks. Her research interests include
strategic knowledge networks, Mode 2 knowledge, virtual communities and global
education.

5. PEER ASSESSMENT
https://etoilepm.cs-dc.org/
Hypernetwork-based Peer Marking for Scalable Certificated Mass Education
Jeff Johnson, Cristian Jimenez-Romero, David Rodrigues, Jane Bromley and Alistair Willis
The Open University, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK
In the context of the need for massive free education for the Complex Systems Society and the
UNESCO Complex Systems Digital Campus, scalable methods are essential for assessing tens of
thousands of students’ work for certification1. Automated marking is a partial solution but has many
drawbacks. Peer marking, where students mark each others’ assignments, is a scalable solution since
every extra student is an extra marker. However there are concerns about the quality of peer marking,
since some students may not be competent to mark the work of others. Some students are better than
others and often the best students are well qualified to assess the work of their peers. To make peer
marking high quality we are using new hypernetwork-based methods to extend previous methods2 to
discover which students are good markers and which students are less good as a course progresses.
Peer marking is becoming increasingly used in education. It has the obvious pedagogic advantage that
marking other students’ assignments gives students insights into how well or otherwise the marker
themself performed. This alone makes peer marking attractive. To allow for variable quality in
marking it is common for students to mark the assignments of two or three other students, but marking

6. IN STUDIO

7. TEACHING
ARCHITECTURE IS A
HANDS ON APPROACH
ideia
esqiços de projecto
João Tereso & Giuseppe Schillaci sketches

8. PEER ASSESSMENT
THE EXPERIMENT
Two Classes of the 2nd year of Architecture of ISCTE-IUL
corresponding to 45 students.
Two Peer Assessment Phases
1. Mid semester, after a few weeks into the semester
2. During the final Assessment when Work is presented to
Jury
At each phase each student had to Assess the work of three
randomly selected colleagues.

9. PEER ASSESSMENT
THE EXPERIMENT
Not anonymous and done in the classroom.
Students presented their models, plans, graphic diaries, etc…
Markers assessed the materials presented against the
programme of the exercise and a prepared marking guide.
Students were instructed to assess what was presented and not
to take into consideration the past in-class experience
Students were instructed that their marking performance was
going to be pondered in the course final mark.

10. ASSESSMENT SLIP

11. ASSESSMENT SLIP
ID Area

12. ASSESSMENT SLIP
Mark (0-100)

13. ASSESSMENT SLIP
The Positives of the Architecture Project

14. ASSESSMENT SLIP
Things to improve in the current project

15. RESULTS

16. 2 GROUPS
MID SEMESTER
ASSESSMENT

17. CRITICAL DISCOURSE
APPLIED IN CLASS
AFTER 1ST ASSESSMENT
Some students engaged strongly
with this process going beyond
what was asked.
They adopted aspects of the
architecture language learned
from other students assessments
of their work
Students included in their own
work suggestions from the peer
assessment.

18. 1 GROUP
FINAL ASSESSMENT

19. MARKS SPREAD
LESS THAN 20%
●
●
● ● ● ● ● ● ●
●
● ● ● ● ●
●
● ● ● ● ● ●
● ●
● ● ●
●
● ● ● ● ●
●
●
● ● ● ●
0 10 20 30 40
0 10 20 30 40
order
marks spread

20. FINAL MARKS
AGREE WITH
PROFESSOR MARKS
●
●
● ●
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
● ● ●
● ●
●
●
●
0 10 20 30 40
−4 −2 0 2 4
order
score diference
Final Mark is the simple
average of all markers.
Students Marks are similar
to that of Jury (2 professors
+ external jury).
Average Mark – Jury Mark (20pt scale)

21. GOOD STUDENTS,
GOOD MARKERS?
Who are the good Markers?
Hypothesis Definition: Those who mark in agreement with the
jury final mark.
in the étoile platform, we studied another hypothesis:
Two students are good markers if they mark
consistently with each other over several iterations
while when in the presence of inconsistent marking
behaviour, one of will not be a good marker.

22. MARKER’S MARKS
CORRELATE WITH
FINAL MARK
correlation = 0.645

23. MARKER’S ERROR
DOES NOT CORRELATE WITH
MARKER’S FINAL MARK
Correlation: -0.063

24. CONCLUSIONS

25. BACK TO THE
OBJECTIVES
Make 2nd year architecture students develop a critical
thinking process about Architecture Projects.
Improve quality of their work by providing more and varied
feedback.
Evaluate the applicability of peer assessment in the
classroom
Evaluate the students critical thinking as part of their
cognitive skills.

26. MAIN POINTS TO
TAKE HOME
Peer Assessment is a good pedagogic tool to apply in
architecture classrooms.
Peer assessment marks correlate highly with expert assessment.
Prospect of using Peer Assessment for scalability.

27. FUTURE
Machine Learning
for the textual analysis, summarization and marking
of the students critical thought
(Now professor reads all paper slips,
doesn’t scale for Massive free education)
Move acquisition to digital realm
étoile peer assessment platform is now ready but…
as seen in this case, a simple analogic works well
as students use the tools they are used to (drawing pads /
pens / etc…)
This is a problem for Human-Computer Interface to solve
in this particular contexts