What is it?
Peer-assessment requires students to monitor and make judgments about the quality of their peer’s achievements and learning outcomes. It can work particularly well with learning or assessment activities in which the student body acts as an audience (presentations or role plays) or with writing tasks. It can also be used to provide feedback during stages of an assessment activity, such as written reports.
Self-assessment has similar attributes. It is valuable in guiding a student to make an honest assessment of their own capabilities and helps them gain confidence in integrating self-directed learning in their study routines.
Why use it?
- Provides opportunities for feedback within a supported environment, facilitated by open discussions either online or during class time. Focus should be provided on explaining, guiding and managing the learning process by empowering students to critically assess and provide constructive feedback on each other’s work as well as their own.
- Fosters group cohesion by promoting ‘ownership’ of learning, and the peer review process develops clarity of thought and expression in a social context.
- Provides an opportunity to learn to work cooperatively and this aligns to processes in modern workplaces. It also provides students with skills in reflection and evaluation and it helps to promote the practice of constructive criticism.
How do I do it?
- For example, provide students with a sample writing task. As a group, students can discuss and determine what should be assessed and the criteria for the successful completion of the communication task.
- Allow students to practise peer reviewing. Students assess this using criteria they have developed or have been given, and determine how to convey feedback clearly to the fictitious student.
- Peers can correct or review preliminary work or early drafts of a piece of work, while the teacher grades a more refined final document/product.
- The final grade awarded could be a combination of the teacher’s mark and peer graders’ averaged mark.
- If reviewing an online assessment task, files can be exchanged for peer review and comment. Analytics (if available) may also be used to automatically measure the level and regularity of engagement with the peer review if an online forum is used.
- Students can also develop rubrics.
Considerations
- As peer review is likely to be an unfamiliar or new learning/ assessment activity for many students, careful planning and design is needed to ensure that expectations are clear and that specific tasks are adequately defined and framed.
- The development of clear marking rubrics and ensuring that students are able to interpret and apply the criteria are critical elements to facilitating effective self and peer-assessment.
- Skills in self and peer-assessment are developed incrementally and scaffolded through practice, so it may be necessary to develop a strategy for teaching and using these skills at the program level.
Resources
Tips on writing and receiving evaluation – https://www.uow.edu.au/student/learning-co-op/assessments/evaluation/
This is a comprehensive review of self and peer assessment including the design of self and peer assessment and how it can be assessed – https://www.deakin.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/53462/peer-and-self-assessment.pdf
