My class works together over the course of 15 weeks creating a social media campaign for Easter Seals. While I spend three contact hours with them a week, a large portion of their work happens in the hours and days between our face to face contact. In previous versions of this course, I have given the students a broad, casual prompt for peer assessment: "Send me your thoughts on how your group worked before the end of the semester. Assign each person a grade." The results were disasterous. Many students defaulted to "It was fun. I think we all deserve As." Others opted to not grade their peers. Some gave gratutious credit to their friends or themselves. Clearly, I was going about this all wrong. So what is the right way to implement peer assessment?
Peer Assessment is the practice of engaging students within the evaluative grading process. It is typically used in combination with small team and group work, where there is an inherent challenge of ownership over the final product. Without observing all of a teams' actions, it can be difficult for a teacher to assess the role of the individual apart from the other team members. Peer Assessment is also a useful tool for presentation and interview activities, where the students are the audience to a single peer's performance.
Peer Assessment can help students to:
- Work within a community
- Communicate and collaborate
- Think critically and reflectively
- Critique the effectiveness of their peers[7]
Peer evaluation can level the playing field in the classroom, especially in the power dynamic between students and teachers. Since they are more involved in the process of assessment, peer assessment can "get a more sophisticated grasp of the learning process." [8]
Peer Assessment is formative when the peer review occurs at multiple points throughout the process. This encourages students to take the feedback from their peers and use it to change or alter their performance as needed. Iterative peer assessment can help students respond more quickly to issues that may impact their learning and performance outcome.
Peer Assessment can also be summative when done at the end of the project. It can show the path that the student has traveled on, and how they have learned along that path.
Peer Assessment in Practice
As I introduce the concept of peer assessment to my class, I ask them to define important characteristics when working together as a group. Together we define Participation, Cooperation, Time Management, Attentiveness, Communication, Initiative and Creativity. With these ideals in place, I create a rubric and present it to the students to review and approve.
When using peer assessment, it can be helpful to involve the students in the process of crafting the assessment itself. They can be tasked to devise criteria for what should be on the assessment, and to discuss and create any rubric that is used in assessing. In doing this, students feel a greater sense of ownership over the assessment practice.
Rationale for the peer assessment should also be provided. Put the practice in context - that their input is important not just for this assignment, but also later on in life as a critical thinking skill.
Allow students to "test-drive" the peer assessment before it is formally used. This can be accomplished through role-play, interviews, and brief tasks. [9]
When using peer assessment for grading purposes, student feedback should be anonymized to remove any external social forces which may taint the results. As students evaluate their peers, have them also complete a self-assessment using the same guidelines.
Peer assessment should not be the primary source for a student's grade. It is at its best when combined with teacher assessment, whole group or team assessment, and self-assessment.
Learning Ecologies that Benefit from Peer Assessment
Social Constructivism
Social constructivism believes that "development happens when a person works in a social seting with others, not as a result of independent study." [2]Peer assessment can play a key role in these types of collaborative learning environments.
In a social constructivist setting, there are many student roles and outcomes that are served well by peer assessment, including:
- reflecting on the student's experience
- communal knowledge
- respecting alternative viewpoints
Project-Based Learning
Project-based learning revolves around student-led inquiry that results in a completed artifact created by an individual or group. The fact that the learning is showcased is some manner - either through a performance, presentation, or event - provides an excellent opportunity for peer assessment.
Communities of Practice
Communities of Practice involve "social learning that occurs when people who have a common interest in a subject or area collaborate over an extended period of time, sharing ideas and strategies, determine solutions, and build innovations." [3]
Within a community of practice, peer assessment can help learners understand the expectations and structure of the community. With formative peer assessment, this feedback is continual, allowing learners to listen to and be guided by the group, and "experiment with and gradually internalize the norms of the community." [8]
Drawbacks in using Peer Assessment
Studies have found common concerns that students face when encountering peer assessment, particularly the first time they are introduced to it:
- Students worry about their own shortcomings
- Students doubt their own objectivity
- Students feel the process may not be as fair as teacher assessment
- Social circumstances may impact grades (hostility, friendships, popularity)
- Grading is the teacher's job, not the student's [5]
Pond, Ulhaq & Wade also found four specific factors that resulted in skewed peer assessment results:
- Friendship Rating - Students have a tendency to overmark their friends, and undermark students that they do not like socially.
- Collusive Rating - Without enough differentiation in a group, scores are generally the same. This can result in the assessment of "well, I think we all deserve A's" as it is harder for students to see the spectrum of contribution.
- Decibel Rating - Certain individuals tend to dominate or overpower groups, skewing the rankings of the group as a whole.
- Parasite Rating - Students end up coasting along on the efforts of their peers, yet still receive higher group marks. [6]
A study done by The University of Wellington shows the following critical feedback from students that participated in peer asessment:
"Lots of students are younger so they don’t have much life experience and they don’t know much, so they can’t give you good feedback, and can be more timid so not willing to give honest opinions.”
“The worst thing was that it became a bit of a popularity thing: if you were well-liked you got good feedback if not well-liked you got criticised. So it’s better when teachers mark you because they are neutral, not biased like that…it didn’t seem like our comments contributed to the marks, and it wasn’t in-depth enough- not taken seriously enough."
Conclusion & Reflection
In her paper "Assessment Matters," Dorothy Spiller combined outcomes from seven case studies to highlight optimal model for the sucess of peer assessment:
- Product Scope - make sure the project is of a size that the students don't become overwhelmed by the amount of work they need to assess.
- Revision - allow time for students to respond and grow from peer assessment, prior to a final teacher assessment.
- Direction - allow students to take turns being both the assessor and the assessee.
- Contact - present the findings of the assessment to students in a timely manner, along with recommendations for revision.
- Size - make sure that groups of assessors and assessees are large enough to provide rounded feedback (two participants may be too small, six may be too cumbersome).[8]
Peer assessment can be an incredibly insighful and supportive form of assessment, particularly in projects with group dynamics in play or when the finished artifact results in a performance that can be viewed by an audience. It introduces students to the concepts of critically thinking about the participation of their peers and how that supports a larger sum of knowledge and ability. This is a skill that is valuable not just in school, but also professionally as students become adults.
Peer assessment should not be used as the only metric to a grade, as it undermines the role of the teacher and can be biased depending upon social dynamics in the classroom. Because of this, it should be used in combination with other forms of assessment and weighted in a way that is meaningful to the project.
References
1. Boud, David; Falchikov, Nancy. "Aligning assessment with long-term learning." 2006. http://www.jhsph.edu/departments/population-family-and-reproductive-health/_docs/teaching-resources/cla-01-aligning-assessment-with-long-term-learning.pdf
2. Crane, Malgorzata. "Lev Vygotsky." 2014. https://cgscholar.com/community/profiles/malgorzata-crane/publications/30267
3. Dean, Keri. "Lave and Wenger's Communities of Practice." 2014. https://cgscholar.com/community/profiles/keri-dean/publications/29078
4. Martin, Kimberly. "Situated Learning Theory." 2014. https://cgscholar.com/community/profiles/kimberly-martin/publications/29071
5. Orsmond, Paul. "Self- and Peer-Assessment." 2004. ftp://www.bioscience.heacademy.ac.uk/TeachingGuides/fulltext.pdf
6. Pond, Keith; Ulhaq, R; Wade, W. "Peer Review: A Precursor to Peer Assessment." 1995.
7. Sluijsmans, D. M. A., & Prins, F. "A conceptual framework for integrating peer assessment in teacher education." 2006. http://dspace.ou.nl/bitstream/1820/1724/1/Sluijsmans_Prins_SEE_def_.pdf
8. Spiller, Dorothy. "Assessment Matters: Self-Assessment and Peer Assessment." 2012. http://www.waikato.ac.nz/tdu/pdf/booklets/9_SelfPeerAssessment.pdf
9. Topping, Keith. "Peer Assessment between Students in Colleges and Universities." 1998. http://120.114.52.149/~T093000259/repository/fetch/1170598-Topping.pdf