Relationships between student characteristics and self‐, peer and tutor evaluations of oral presentations

There are many influences on how assessors grade themselves and others. Oral presentations are useful for exploring such factors in peer, self‐ and tutor marked assessments, being rapidly completed and assessed, commonly used in HE and very difficult to anonymize. This opportunistic study examined the effects of gender and level of attainment on the triangulation of marks awarded to student presenters. Grades generated by peer assessment were associated more strongly with tutor‐awarded marks than those from self‐assessment. For self‐assessment there was a strong effect of gender (female students undervalued their performance compared with tutor grades). Peer assessment produced higher marks than from tutors, perhaps because of the close‐knit community developed during residential courses. For tutor marks, the greatest variability was at the lower end of the scale, whereas peer assessors were most variable when marking students who self‐evaluated or peer assessed highly. Students awarded a narrower range of marks to peers compared with tutors, but when self‐assessing used a larger range. Presentations by students who admitted to little sleep the night before received lower grades from both peers and tutors, but this was not reflected by self‐assessments, suggesting they were unaware of their poorer performances. Sessions with fewer talks (four rather than seven) reduced the ‘dip’ in marks previously observed in the middle of sessions. Findings are discussed in the context of bias in this mode of assessment.     

Intentionality as measured in the persistence and elaboration of communication by chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

In human infancy, 2 criteria for intentional communication are (a) persistence in and (b) elaboration of communication when initial attempts to communicate fail. Twenty-nine chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) were presented with both desirable (a banana) and undesirable food (commercial primate chow). Three conditions were administered: (a) the banana was delivered (successful communication), (b) half of the banana was delivered (partially successful communication), and (c) the chow was delivered (failed communication). The chimpanzees exhibited persistence in and elaboration of their communication in every condition except when the banana was delivered. Thus, their communication was about a specific item, demonstrating that both intentionality and nonverbal reference are capacities shared by humans with our nearest living relatives, the great apes.     

A symposium on “speech act theory in mainstream communication research”: An introduction

The referential, sequential, and inferential dimensions of discourse are explicated and discussed in order to obtain a vantage point from which to view the contributions of speech‐act theory to our understanding of human communication processes. A preview is then provided of four papers, each of which explores the intersection of two or more of these dimensions in order to enrich our understanding of speech‐act theory.