The blind leading the blind? Filling the knowledge gaps by student peer assessment

Scholarly contextualisation: There is a need to fill gaps in knowledge from secondary school before starting university curriculum. Cooperative learning, a form of active learning, implicitly includes peer-to-peer teaching, and is a good candidate when filling the knowledge gaps relies on high student involvement. Aim and Problem: 1) We describe a teaching intervention developed and implemented by KM specifically to fill the knowledge gaps by peer assessment in basic mathematics for PhD students at the Faculty of Health Sciences. 2) Through interviews and observations, different aspects of filling the knowledge gaps by peer assessment are investigated. Methods: The intervention consisted of two parts. First, an individual preparation consisting of a set of problems from 10th grade mathematics. The second part was the actual seminar, where students reviewed the problems by cooperative peer assessment. Five analyses were performed: 1) Analysis of submitted problem sets, 2) observations of the seminar, 3) interview with the teaching assistant, 4) interviews with students, and 5) a questionnaire. Findings: Is 10th grade mathematics the adequate level? The student interviews and survey suggest that both highly skilled and less skilled students found the maths seminar useful. Was there a good balance between effort and outcome? The student interviews and survey revealed large variation in time spent for preparations, as expected due to the various skill levels. How did the students collaborate? The intended cooperative learning was one of the strategies that the students used for peer assessment. Other strategies included majority vote and resolving disagreements by engaging teaching staff. Discussion and reflection: Condorcet's jury theorem (1785) describes the probability of reaching the correct decision through majority vote and is used as a starting point for discussion around the success of cooperative learning and peer assessment. With the right width of the knowledge gap, enough students in a group will reach the correct answer by themselves for the group to reach the correct answer. In this perspective, the described maths seminar is not the blind leading the blind, but a project supported not only in pedagogical theory, but in probability theory itself.