Instituto Superior Técnico

26 to 26, Jul. 2010

It will be held at Instituto Superior Técnico, on July 26th, a Seminar and Workshop by CEG-IST.

Seminar, 10.30 - 12.00

ROOM EA1

General presentation by Anne Gardiner on the uses and potential of the SPARKPLUS software. No pre-enrolment is required for this session.

Potential Audience: academic staff from engineering or other areas who could be interested in applying this approach for future assessment of students in group-work activities.

Workshop, 14.30 - 16.00

ROOM SCDEEC2, Electricity Department basement

Hands-on workshop in a computer laboratory (as participant numbers in the afternoon session are limited to 10, pre-enrolment is required).

Potential participants: academics who already have some experience of using SPARKPLUS or those who haven't used it yet but are interested in its potential for generating data for research or evaluation purposes.

Background on SPARKPLUS Software
SPARKPLUS is a web-based self and peer assessment kit developed by the Engineering Faculty of the University of Technology, Sydney. It enables students to confidentially rate their own and their peers' contributions to a team task or individual submissions.

SPARKPLUS not only enables students to confidentially rate their own and their peers' contributions to a team project, but also allows students to self and peer assess individual work and improve their judgment through benchmarking exercises. Being a criteria-based tool SPARKPLUS allows academics the flexibility to choose or create specifically targeted criteria to allow any task or attribute development to be assessed.

In addition, SPARKPLUS facilitates the use of common categories, to which academics link their chosen criteria, providing a means for both academics and students to track students' development as they progress through their degree. SPARKPLUS automates data collection, collation, calculation and distribution of feedback and results.

Anne Gardiner is a Senior Lecturer of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia and a member of the design team that developed SPARKPLUS. She is the 2010 Conference Chair of the Australasian Association of Engineering Education.