Introduction and Definitions
“Peer assessment or peer review provides a structured learning process for students to critique and provide feedback to each other on their work. It helps students develop lifelong skills in assessing and providing feedback to others, and also equips them with skills to self-assess and improve their own work.” Peer Assessment
“Peer assessment, or peer learning, is the process by which students learn from and with each other. It suggests a reciprocal learning process, and it should be mutually beneficial to students.
When students engage in the exchange and explanation of ideas, it helps solidify their understanding of concepts, promotes collaboration, and encourages giving and receiving evaluation.” Designing Effective Peer and Self-Assessment
“Peer review is the practice of assigning students to read or view each other’s work and offer feedback. Peer review can take place in class, either in small groups or with a small seminar (often moderated by an instructor), or in groups or partners outside of class, for instance through Canvas. A number of assignment types can be used in peer review, including analytical papers, research or project proposals, posters, blog posts, podcasts, and creative work in various media.” Peer Review
Benefits and Challenges of Peer Assessment for Students
Peer assessment can be used in a variety of settings (e.g., large lecture classes or small seminars) for a variety of assignments (e.g., short essay or longer research papers) It has benefits and challenges for both the students giving and receiving feedback. The benefits for students include the following:
- Take responsibility for and manage their own learning
- Participate in active learning by engaging in the feedback process rather than just passively receiving feedback from instructors
- Improve learning and understanding of subject, leading to better performance on exams and tests and thus greater academic success
- Learn to assess and give others constructive feedback and develop lifelong assessment skills that transfer to real-world settings where collaborative work is common
- Better realize the nuances between various level of performance by being exposed to each other’s work
- Gain experience applying (and possibly creating) objective criteria to judge the quality of a task or performance and thus gain greater understanding of evaluation criteria
- Learn to collaborate with others towards a common goal
- Become more personally accountable for their share of workload in group projects
- Gain new opportunities to examine diverse perspectives and ideas
- Learn about the academic writing process
- Develop critical thinking skills
- Develop skills for evaluating and reflecting on their own performance
The challenges of peer assessment for students include the following:
- Unfair/biased results due to friendship/ collusion/peer pressure
- Inconsistent quality of feedback provided
- Need to be trained to give useful and constructive peer feedback
- Reluctance to make judgments regarding peers
- Greater time commitment
- Not taking assignment seriously
Using Peer Assessment
Considerations for using peer assessment
- Let students know the rationale for doing peer review
- Identify assignments or activities for which students might benefit from peer feedback.
- Determine whether peer review activities will be conducted as in-class or out-of-class assignments
- Give clear directions and time limits for in-class peer review sessions and set defined deadlines for out-of-class peer review assignments
- With student input, design guidelines or rubrics with clearly defined tasks for the reviewer.
- Design or adapt peer-review worksheets that students will complete during each peer-review session.
- Model evaluating an exemplar in front of students.
- Go through the peer review process with the students before asking them to do it.
- Teach students to review rather than to edit by focusing on content and structure and discussing ideas and organization.
- Give feedback on students’ feedback to each other
- Regularly assess how peer-review activities are going; ask students to reflect on the process and seek and incorporate their feedback.
- Model appropriate, constructive criticism and descriptive feedback through your own comments on student work and well-constructed rubrics
Sources
Cornell University Center for Teaching Innovation
Peer Assessment
University of Florida Information Technology
Designing Effective Peer and Self-Assessment
Princeton University Canvas@Princeton
Peer Review
University of Colorado/Boulder Center for Teaching & Learning
Student Peer Assessment
Northern Illinois University Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning
Peer and Self-Assessment
Washington University in St. Louis Center for Teaching and Learning
Planning and Guiding In-Class Peer Review
University of Wisconsin/La Crosse CATL Teaching Improvement Guide
Peer Evaluation Guide
University of Nevada/Reno Office of Digital Learning
Peer review strategies
The University of British Columbia Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology
Student Peer Assessment
University of Waterloo Centre for Teaching Excellence
Using Peer Review in Any Class
Santa Clara University Faculty Collaborative for Teaching Innovation
Student Peer Review
West Virginia University SpeakWrite and Writing Studio
How to Teach Peer Review
Examples of instructions for students on how to review peers’ work
Purdue Online Writing Lab
Giving Feedback for Peer Review
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Peer Review Guidelines
University of Michigan Sweetland Center for Writing
Using Peer Review to Improve Student Writing
Carleton College Library
Guidelines for Students – Peer Review