THE EFFECTS OF ONLINE PEER ASSESSMENT AND FAMILY ENTREPRENEURIAL EXPERIENCE ON STUDENTS’ BUSINESS PLANNING PERFORMANCE

ABSTRACT

Problem Statement: In recent years, many educators and researchers in the field of education have made efforts to leverage the advantages provided by online peer assessment, leading to its extensive application in a range of domains, particularly higher education. However, studies on the roles of the reviewer and author in online peer assessment are often limited to student perceptions and feelings, rather than empirical data and it remains unclear how these influence learning. It is essential to determine which role benefits students more, or whether both roles together contribute to learning. In addition, the business experience of the parents to have a significant influence on the entrepreneurial spirit of the children. Therefore, entrepreneurial experience of the family and learning modes should be considered together when exploring students’ business planning writing performance.

Purpose of Study: This study explores whether the performance of students in business planning classes is influenced by the roles they play in the review process (reviewer, author or both) as well as by the entrepreneurial experience of their families

Methods: This study recruited 128 students from two fourth year elective classes in entrepreneur management at a university in northern Taiwan. The non-equivalent group quasi-experimental design was utilized to compare the quality of business plans written under three assessment modes. a 3x2 ANCOVA was used to investigate the interaction between the assessment mode and entrepreneurial experience of the family. The dependent variables indicated the quality of the business plans measured according to the seven business plan assessment criteria.

Findings and Results: Results showed the learning effectiveness of those in the reviewer group is far more successful than for those in the author group. Our results also showed that if the student's family had entrepreneurial experience, the learning gains of the peer group would be better than those of the other two groups.

Recommendations: Researchers who are interested in this issue might continue to explore the topic through the following: (1) investigate whether results differ in different educational settings or with different cultural backgrounds; (2) perform similar studies in different disciplines and compare their results with those of this study. (3) To overcome the practical difficulties in observing the continued entrepreneurial actions of students, researchers could encourage students to participate in entrepreneurial competitions within or outside of campus, to better observe entrepreneurial performance after the business planning course.