Festival of Learning 2018

Participants are encouraged to bring their own laptops to this session

This presentation introduces ComPAIR, an innovative peer feedback and teaching technology developed at UBC that provides students a safe, flexible environment to develop the skill of evaluating another person’s work, and in turn, receive evaluations from their peers.

Particularly in introductory courses, the effectiveness of peer feedback can be limited by the relative newness of students to both the course content and the skills involved in providing good feedback. ComPAIR’s novel design makes use of students’ inherent ability and desire to compare: according to the psychological principle of comparative judgement, novices are much better at choosing the “better” of two answers than they are at giving those answers an absolute score. By scaffolding peer feedback through comparisons, ComPAIR provides an engaging, simple, and safe environment that supports two distinct outcomes: 1) students learn how to assess their own work and that of others in a way that 2) facilitates the learning of subtle aspects of course content through the act of comparing.

We will review the results of an extended assessment of student experience with ComPAIR through three pilot courses in English, Physics and Math at UBC. Session Participants will have the opportunity to actually use the software from the perspective of an instructor, course administrator, and student. There will also be an interactive portion of the session to demonstrate how comparisons are used for learning.

ComPAIR is open source software developed at UBC. Details on how to set up compare at your own institution can be found here: https://lthub.ubc.ca/guides/compair/.