STANDARDS OF QUALITY IN
INFORMATION SERVICE AND PRODUCT DESIGN:
A CASE STUDY USING PEER ASSESSMENT


Merolyn Coombs and Hilary Yerbury

EXCELLENCE IN PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE


The quality of professional information practice is judged 
against the traditions of information work, user expectations and 
against requirements such as Australian and International 
Standards. However, in an area of practice where the professional 
might never see the consequences of their actions, (because the 
effects of information utilisation are rarely immediate (Larsen, 
1980)) an understanding of the concept of quality is often 
elusive, even though an individual may competently provide 
information services on many separate occasions.

To enable students in their third year of the Bachelor of Applied 
Science in Information Studies to come to a conceptual 
understanding of quality, a segment of the compulsory subject 
Information Science 5 was designed with a focus on quality both 
as a concept and as a requirement of professional practice. The 
mechanism for achieving the integration of the concept and its 
implementation was peer assessment.

PEER ASSESSMENT AND QUALITY


Peer assessment gives students two ways of demonstrating that 
they have understood the concept of quality. The first is through 
the ability to produce a product or service with features which 
match those indicated in the standard of excellence. The second 
is through the ability to analyse the work of someone else, by 
matching it against the same standard and to identify the 
strength and weaknesses of that person's work. 

To prepare students for an assignment in which their 
understanding would be based on their ability to apply the 
International Standard on Abstracting (ISO 214-1976(E)) and to 
provide feedback to a fellow student on the same exercise, a 
range of learning experiences were provided, including a package 
of printed materials (lecture notes, examples of how the standard 
could be used and a series of activites to practice different 
ways of constructing an abstract), in-class practice exercises 
with follow up discussion and question and answer sessions. The 
question and answer sessions allowed students to clarify their 
understanding of the concept, the requirements of the Standard, 
the procedures for the assignment and the demands of peer 
assessment. 

The package also included a summary from the literature defining 
peer assessment, which identified the two elements of any 
assessment process, feedback and evaluation. The
feedback element was emphasised both in the notes and in the 
assignment, although students were also asked to evaluate each 
part of the other student's work by assigning a point on a five-
point scale between poor and outstanding. This was part of the 
exercise of demonstrating that they understood the concept of 
quality, and students were aware that academic staff would retain 
the responsibility for assigning the grade for each student's 
performance on the assessment task.


QUALITY, LEARNING AND PEER ASSESSMENT


The students worked conscientiously on the assessment task, and 
seemed genuinely interested in the process of peer assessment. In 
the evaluations they provided of the exercise, (the data 
collection instrument was based on the work of Falchikov, 1986), 
they indicated that they had found it a useful but difficult 
learning exercise. They liked `seeing how other people understood 
the concepts in relation to myself'. But they disliked `writing 
the comments' because `it was hard to have to criticise someone 
else's work'.

From our point of view, the learning outcomes were disappointing. 
Many students did not seem to have `learned' anything more about 
quality than they might have done from more traditional 
`teaching'. The feedback they provided was pedestrian, showing an 
understanding of the mechanical aspects of analysis and the 
preparation of an abstract but with little evidence that these 
processes were related to excellence in providing information 
service.

Furthermore, the students' evaluations of the process did not 
reflect the developing acknowledgement of their own capacity to 
judge the worth of a professional activity. Instead, they showed 
a distrust of the understanding of the fellow student and in some 
cases of the integrity of the fellow student. They also expressed 
the view that only a member of academic staff would know what was 
`right'. This view was typified in the comments `I prefer 
academic staff [to provide feedback] because I feel it is more 
objective and they know the correct answers so give a better 
assessment' and `peer assessment [will only give me] feedback 
from the classmate who is at the same level as me'.

CONCLUSION


There is little indication that the use of peer assessment 
increased students' understanding of the concept of quality. The 
reasons for this are not readily apparent, although there are 
indications from their responses that they did not have a sound 
grasp of reasons why they might need to be concerned with 
demonstrating that they understand what constitutes excellence in 
professional practice. However, since the majority of students 
thought that the process of peer assessment was challenging and 
made them think, we will use peer assessment again next year as 
the mechanism for teaching an understanding of quality, albeit in 
a modified form.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

FALCHIKOV,N. (1986) Product comparisons and process benefits of 
collaborative peer group and self assessments. Assessment and 
Evaluation in Higher Education 11(2):146-165

LARSEN,J. (1980) Knowledge Utilisation. Knowledge 1(3):421442

PARASURAMAN,A.,ZEITHAML,V.,BERRY,L. (1985) A conceptual model of 
service quality and its implications for future research. Journal 
of Marketing 49:41-50