Ideas and Strategies for Peer Assessments

Peer assessment is a broad term for a range of activities that include students in the act of evaluating and providing feedback on the work of their peers. It can be formative, where students give feedback on each other’s drafts before a final product is submitted, or summative, where students use a rubric to grade final submissions. Peer assessment is most commonly used with written work, but can also be used with presentations, performances, posters, videos and other types of assignments. It is also commonly used as a strategy for students to assess the contributions of their fellow students to group work and assignments. Students benefit from peer assessment in a number of ways: receiving more frequent and timely feedback than when the instructor is the only one providing it, getting feedback on drafts and being able to make improvements, and engaging in the critical analysis and reflection associated with assessing the work of their peers.
 
…if feedback processes are to enhance learning, we must move beyond a view of feedback as transmission and acknowledge the active role that students must play in such. (Nicol, Thomson and Breslin 2014)
 

How does peer assessment work?

Peer assessment can take many forms that can vary depending on the learning goals, the disciplinary or curricular context, and available technologies. Peer assessment is often characterized as taking either a formative or summative approach.

 

How can peer assessment improve student learning?

• Clarifying assignment goals and criteria – The act of assessing peers requires students to examine assignment criteria more closely and gives them practice applying the criteria to multiple examples, giving them better ability to reflect on how their own work matches up against the criteria. Students can have different conceptions about learning goals and criteria from those of instructors (Hounsell, 1997; Norton, 1990). Through peer assessment practice, students will become familiar with assessment criteria and aware of the traits that distinguish successful performance from those that fail to meet the expectation.
• More feedback, more quickly – Instructors are often unable to give frequent detailed feedback on multiple writing assignments. Instructor time is cited as one of the major factors limiting increased opportunities for students to practice writing and get feedback on their work (Cho and Schunn 2007). Also, students are often asked to wait for a couple of weeks until they receive feedback from an instructor/TA. Receiving feedback from multiple peers also provides potentially more diverse feedback and offers the chance to learn from different perspectives.
• Learning through giving feedback – Students learn through the act of providing constructive feedback as it engages students in complex problem solving processes of diagnosing problems and suggesting solutions. Studies have shown that providing elaborated feedback that includes descriptions of problems and scaffolded solutions is the element of peer assessment that most benefits student learning (Lie et al. 2010, 2012; Topping et al. 2013).
• Increased critical engagement with assignments – Peer assessment increases time students spend thinking critically about an assignment through “reviewing, summarizing clarifying, giving feedback, diagnosing misconceived knowledge, identifying missing knowledge and considering deviations from the ideal.” (Topping 1998) These activities help to reinforce and deepen learning.
• Encourages reflective comparison – When students assess their peers’ work they are actively comparing their own work to their peers’ work with reference to assignment requirements, instructor expectations, and perceptions of quality (Baker 2016; Nicol, Thomson and Breslin 2014). Engaging students as critical readers of their peers’ writing also helps them develop a better understanding of how readers might interpret the texts they produce (Cho and Cho 2011; MacArthur 2010).
• Active engagement – Peer assessment encourages active learning by engaging students in the feedback process rather than just being passive recipients of feedback from an instructor (Liu and Carless 2006; Cartney 2010; Nicol 2011). In so doing, they are alerted to the value of the feedback as opposed to seeing it as a justification for a grade. Peer assessment can help to provide opportunities for earlier feedback so that students can use it to improve their work through revising drafts or incorporating what they’ve learned into subsequent assignments. Studies show students are more motivated to engage with and use feedback when the immediate utility of that feedback is clear (Moore and Teather 2013). Opportunities to apply knowledge through practice and receive quality feedback on that practice are known to have positive impacts on student learning (Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick 2006).
• Improved understanding of their own work – Students develop the metacognitive capacity to think more critically about their own work through the evaluation of their peers’ work. Training and experience in peer assessment may also help to correct the adverse effects of students overestimating or underestimating their own performance and can result in students becoming more independent learners, lessening the dependence on feedback from instructors (Nicol, Thomson and Breslin 2014).
• Increased opportunities for writing in the discipline – Including students in the process of providing feedback and possibly grading the work of their peers can be a way to incorporate more disciplinary based writing activities without placing too much additional burden on instructor time.
• Development of lifelong skills – Peer assessment helps students develop lifelong, transferable skills such as engaging in critical review of the work of peers and colleagues, communicating feedback in a constructive and positive way, learning to accept the feedback of others and incorporating the feedback from multiple people into their work. This helps to prepare them to engage in these type of activities independently once they leave school.

“…students are not just learning by constructing meaning from feedback provided by others, rather they are learning by constructing feedback ‘meanings’ themselves .”(Nicol 2011)

Understanding different types of peer assessment

The concept of peer assessment is broad and thus can be implemented in a variety of different ways, so it is important to think through some of the basic elements that go into designing a peer assessment activity in light of the desired learning outcomes. (modified from Gielen 2010 and Topping 1998).

• Object of assessment – What will students produce? (paper, web page, poster, presentation, video, group project participation/contribution) What skills are students expected to develop and demonstrate as they produce this artifact?
• Product of peer assessment – What is the output that students create while assessing their peers? (grades, rubric, ranking, guided questions, qualitative feedback)
• Formative or Summative – Will the final product be peer assessed for a grade or will students submit a draft product for peer assessment that they can revise before submitting to the instructor?
• Grading – How will students be graded on the assignment? Will peer assessment replace the instructor assessment (substitutional)? Will students receive marks or feedback from both peers and instructors (partially substitutional)? Or, will peer assessment provide additional feedback but be primarily assessed by the instructor for the final grade (supplementary)? Will you give students feedback or assign a grade, with or without evaluation, for their assessments of their peers?
• Reviewer organizationand directionality – How will peer assessors be assigned? (e.g. randomized, self-selected, instructor selected, small group, pair-matched). How many assessments will you require each student to complete? Will the reviews be anonymous or will there be dialogue between the peers reviewing each other?
• Training – How experienced and confident are the students with peer assessment? How will students be trained to assess the work of their peers and provide feedback? At what point in the process does the training occur?
• Frequency and positioning – Will there be multiple scaffolded activities across a term or a single peer assessed activity? Will the peer assessment be used to provide feedback at multiple stages in a larger assignment or at the end of an assignment? Will there be a ‘practice peer feedback activity’ to get students familiar and comfortable with this? Are students’ skills and familiarity built up over a series of courses at a curricular level or is this type of activity unique to your course?

 

Types of peer assessment

• Formative Feedback – Students provide formative and constructive feedback on drafts that students are able to revise before submitting a final product. This can be done as a an in-class activity or using a variety of online tools, including in Canvas at UBC. The final grade is given by the instructor or TA. This can also be done using a sequence of assignments. Students get peer feedback after each assignment and then are able to apply the feedback to each subsequent assignment with the goal of improving over time.
• Peer grading – Students assign grades to their peers based on assessment criteria. Peer grading is typically done using online tools that randomly and anonymously distribute assignments for review by a specified number of other students. Students grade their peers using an online rubric and final scores for a particular assignment are typically tallied by taking the median value of all peer grades that assignment has received.
• Peer assessment of group work participation – Grading group work can be a challenge for instructors, because it is difficult to determine the contributions of each individual students. Many instructors use peer assessment to supplement instructor grades by adding a participation component to group assignments. Students give a participation score and overall comments for each group member using a rubric that is based on criteria that the instructor establishes. The instructor then uses these evaluations to give each student an overall participation grade for the assignment.

 

Tool Comparison Chart

• Canvas Peer Review tool
• peerScholar
• ComPAIR
• CLAS
• iPeer
• UBC Blogs
• ePortfolios

	Canvas	CLAS	ComPAIR	iPeer	peerScholar
Assignment Suitability	text, images, video	text, images, video, audio	text, images, formula	group evaluations	text, images, video, audio
Types of Feedback	text	text, video, audio	text	text	text
Evaluation Configuration	individual	group/class	individual	self, individual, group	self, individual, group
Anonymous Feedback
Annotations
Rubrics
Stages of Assessment
Summative Feedback
Canvas Gradebook Integration
Analytics Report

*Canvas: If the setting for anonymous feedback is applied, the annotation function will be disabled.

Strategies for Success

• Set expectations and clarify goals – Students are often apprehensive about peer assessment, particularly when peer grading is involved, but also with giving and receiving feedback. It is important to clarify expectations and goals of the activity for all involved to build trust at the beginning and get student buy in. Students could be asked to read one of the educational research studies on peer review cited in this guide.
• Provide training for students – Especially for novice students, it is important to provide training activities to teach students how to assess their peers’ work and provide constructive feedback. This can help not just to increase the ability of students to conduct peer assessments, but improve students’ confidence in the process. In large classes, TAs will need to be trained first so they can provide training to students.
• Model assessment and feedback – Model the act of assessing and giving feedback for your students by guiding them through the process of assessing some sample assignments. It helps to provide examples of assessed work that show varying levels of performance or indicate common challenges that you want students to focus on. This can be done through online modules or as in class activities.
• Emphasize written feedback – While rating peers’ texts using rubrics and scoring criteria can improve students writing skills in certain contexts, studies show that students consistently benefit more from providing written feedback to peers than any other activities that are part of the peer review process (Lu and Law 2012; Wooley et al. 2008).
• Encourage elaborated feedback – Novice peer reviewers tend to focus on surface level feedback and revisions, focusing on grammar or error corrections rather than meaning level changes. Giving specific instructions, training and guided feedback prompts can help to raise the quality of the feedback and resulting learning benefits. Studies show students benefit most from constructing feedback where they not only identify strengths and weaknesses but offer suggestions and strategies for improvement. (Patchan and Schun 2015)
• Allow opportunities to apply feedback – Feedback is most useful when learners act on it. Design into the series of activities some opportunities for students to make revisions to their work and reflect on how the feedback they received influenced the revisions. It can also be helpful to have students reflect on the feedback and revision process. Why did they accept or reject suggestions? How did they modify their work after receiving feedback? How did evaluating the work of their peers change the way they saw their own work?
• Allow adequate time and spacing for the process – In order to encourage a deeper level of engagement, begin the peer assessment process early in the term so that there is adequate time for students to reflect on the feedback they receive and apply it to their learning either through revision or on subsequent assignments. Studies have shown that revisions early in the process focused on substantial, content-based changes, while revisions close due date resulted in polishing edits focused on grammar, word substitution, and spelling (Baker 2016; Cho and MacArthur, 2010). In a short 12-week class schedule, the ideal design will start the peer review activities by week 3.
• Align peer assessment to key learning goals – Make sure the peer assessment activities are aligned with core learning goals so that it is clear to students how the activities benefit their learning and are not perceived as an add-on assignment with little value. Peer assessment activities take considerable time and effort from students, but positioned strategically can help focus student effort and deepen critical engagement around key learning goals. If there are grades assigned for the giving of feedback, they must be weighted heavily enough to indicate the importance of this activity.

“While rating peers’ texts using rubrics and scoring criteria can improve students writing skills in certain contexts, students consistently benefit more from providing feedback to peers more than any other activities that are part of the peer review process (Lu and Law 2012; Wooley et al. 2008).” from Patchan and Schunn 2015

Challenges

• Setup and monitoring time – Instructors often adopt peer assessment in hopes of integrating writing activities into their classes without adding too much of an extra time commitment. While peer assessment has shown positive learning benefits for students, there might not be time saving for the instructor in the short or medium term since there is a considerable amount of effort needed to design, implement, and monitor high quality activities (Topping 1998). In the long term, after the assignment has been designed and implemented, there may be time benefits.
• Student acceptance – Even though many studies have shown peer assessed quantitative scoring to be reliable and valid when compared with instructor given grades, students may not accept peer assessment results as accurate or fair and are apprehensive about peers’ scores being used for grading (Carvalho 2013, K. Cho, Schunn, & Wilson, 2006, Topping 1998).
• Student inexperience – Novice students lack both a high level understanding of subject matter issues and experience providing constructive feedback which presents challenges to peer assessment (Cho and Schunn 2007). These challenges need to be mitigated through scaffolding and training. Instructors must be realistic about the ceiling on students’ ability to provide deep feedback.
• Moving beyond surface level engagement – Students new to critically reviewing their peers’ work may focus on providing positive comments or making surface level corrections rather than providing meaningful, high level feedback. Modeling effective feedback is important. Inexperienced student writers also may view revisions as “cleaning up” and revise their texts in a linear manner based on the feedback they receive rather than looking at the overall meaning and structure of their argument (Patchan and Schunn 2015).

 

Summary of the Research