Matthew W. Ohland, Engineering Education, Purdue UniversityRichard A. Layton, Mechanical Engineering, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

Misty L. Loughry, Management, Georgia Southern UniversityHal R. Pomeranz, Deer Run Associates

Software Supporting Peer Evaluation and Team Formation

Tools for peer evaluation and designed by a multi-university research team and software that can form teams according to instructor-specified criteria gather data from students through a web interface, ensuring confidentiality. The rapid growth in users of CATME and Team-Maker system reveals that these tools fill a previously unmet need for managing teams and assessing team skill development. There are currently 829 instructors using the system (773 by steady growth plus an additional 56 added all at once) at 251 different institutions and nearly 34,812 unique student users.

The CATME Peer Evaluation System The Team-Maker Team Assignment System

Survey Editor

Faculty prepare a survey that gathers data from students to be used in forming teams. A wide variety of questions will be available and can be updated based on user feedback.

Delegate Faculty

CATME’s support for multi-section classes has been extended to Team-Maker, granting access to team teachers or Teaching Assistants.

Choose Parameters

Faculty specify the importance of each survey response in forming teams and whether similar students or dissimilar students should be grouped. The schedule grid shown allows faculty to assign teams that have similar schedules.

Creating Teams

The Team-Maker algorithm scores how well each team fits the instructor’s criteria and maximizes the score of the worst-fit team.

Reviewing Team Assignments

Faculty can review the results and adjust the team-assignment criteria if needed.

Click here if Pat’s behavior in “contributing to the team’s work” is consistent with the descriptions in the top row.

The Online InterfaceThe CATME website is a secure interface for collecting data on team-member effectiveness and reporting different views of the data to faculty and students. The CATME system has a number of convenient features—the ability to upload student and team data from files generated by Excel; support for multi-section courses and teaching assistants; the ability to edit teams, reset surveys, send email reminders, and track survey completion. The system also allows students to make comments for instructors to read and can compute grade adjustments based on how the ratings patterns compare with faculty-specified criteria.

Faculty can request an account at www.catme.org. The process of defining a class and setting up teams is wizard-based, but a tutorial is available. Several typical screen shots are captured here:

The first of five rating categories: Contributing to the Team’s Work.

The wizard-based interface for class creation in CATME is typical of other setup screens.

Faculty summary results (raw data available).Student results: by self, by team, average

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Months since the rollout of the CATME System

No. of faculty and staff using CATME Team Tools

institutions using CATME Team Tools

Oct 05

Apr2010