Learning as a peer assessor: evaluating peer-assessment strategies

When students engage in peer assessment activities, they often put emphasis on the feedback they receive from peers but fail to appreciate how their role as a peer assessor can contribute to their learning process and improve their own work. Because of this, students and sometimes teachers undervalue the peer assessment process. This scholarship of teaching and learning project conducts a small-scale controlled experiment with students undertaking peer assessment in randomly assigned groups that either focus on giving and receiving peer feedback or assessing peers’ work only without receiving feedback on their own. In addition, it explores how different peer assessment strategies such as rubric creation, rank order assessment and assessment without qualitative feedback affect both students’ ability to improve their work and their perception of the value of peer assessment. Consistent with theoretical expectations, the results provide exploratory evidence that students’ perceived value of peer assessment is lower when they do not receive feedback, but improvement in their writing is actually higher when they focus on assessing peers’ work rather than receiving feedback on their own. While feedback is a potential benefit of the peer assessment process, it may also distract focus from the potentially more valuable learning that derives from students’ self-evaluating their own work after critically assessing their peers’.