Paper on HAPP assessment methodology wins AoM award

Dr Colin Lee and his co-authors were awarded the Best Paper in Management Education and Development 2024 by the Management Education and Development division of the Academy of Management (AoM) for their paper on the Harmonized Appraisal (HAPP) assessment methodology. The award was announced at AoM’s Annual Meeting conference, which took place in Chicago in August 2024.

The award-winning paper’s authors propose a new student assessment methodology for unstructured and semi-structured assignments, such as essays and presentations. HAPP combines the strengths of rubric-based grading, comment banks, and holistic assessment into a streamlined workflow. This recognition by the Academy of Management highlights the thoughtful work that went into developing HAPP. Dr Lee’s co-authors are Daan Peeters, Judith Auer, Dr Bas Giesbers, and Dr Moritz Appels.

This method aims to provide an efficient and effective approach to the creation of high-information feedback and fair assessment to optimise the positive impact of assessment on students’ learning and development. The HAPP approach uses the grader’s input on a relatively detailed grading form to compute the student’s scores on a conventional rubric and to aggregate a detailed feedback message by leveraging a comment bank.

Dr Lee’s team tested the key tenants of the approach in two undergraduate business courses. They found that students consider feedback from HAPP to be of higher quality and fairer than feedback drawn from a conventional rubric. For graders, the authors found that HAPP provides greater consistency, while the time required to grade is comparable to grading with a rubric. The paper finally discussed how open questions can be addressed and how this study could inform future research on assessment.

The HAPP web application will launch for Erasmus University and RSM faculty in late August. Educators outside of Erasmus University Rotterdam can request a copy of to the Google Apps Script implementation of HAPP using this form or by emailing happ@rsm.nl.

Dr Colin Lee’s research lies at the intersection of human resources, organisational behaviour, industrial and organisational psychology, and career studies. His research in RSM’s department of Organisational and Personnel Management leverages recent developments in data extraction, normalisation, and processing to provide insights into how people can be matched to work and to develop tools for the dissemination of academic knowledge in his fields of interest

Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM) is one of Europe’s top-ranked business schools. RSM provides ground-breaking research and education furthering excellence in all aspects of management and is based in the international port city of Rotterdam – a vital nexus of business, logistics and trade. RSM’s primary focus is on developing business leaders with international careers who can become a force for positive change by carrying their innovative mindset into a sustainable future. Our first-class range of bachelor, master, MBA, PhD and executive programmes encourage them to become critical, creative, caring and collaborative thinkers and doers. www.rsm.nl

For more information about RSM or this release, please contact Erika Harriford-McLaren, communications manager for RSM, on +31 10 408 2877 or by email at harriford@rsm.nl.

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