Show 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. If you are interested in facilitating a team member evaluation process for group projects, see the page on Teaching students to evaluate each other. Peer assessment can: Teaching Quality Assurance Manual
Introduction Self and peer assessment are important aspects of ‘assessment for learning’ practice. Assessing their own work or that of others can help students to develop their understanding of the Intended Learning Outcomes and the Assessment Criteria. Research has shown that learners make more progress when they are actively involved in their own learning and assessment. Self and Peer Assessment will: • Enhance students’ active engagement with their studies• Increase the amount of feedback students receive• Augment learning as peer feedback invariably requires explanation and justification • Help students understand what is considered good work and why, thereby increasing their ability to achieve Self-assessment “is the involvement of students in identifying standards and/ or criteria to apply to their work, and making judgments about the extent to which they have met these criteria and standards…..[it] means more than students grading their own work; it means involving them in the process of determining what is ‘good work’.” 1 Peer Assessment is where “students use criteria and apply standards to the work of their peers in order to judge that work. Both self and peer assessment are “formative, in that it has beneficial effects on learning, but may also be summative, either in the sense of learners deciding that they have learned as much as they wished to do in a given area, or....it may contribute to the grades awarded to the students”. 2 The focus is not necessarily on having students generate their own grades, but rather providing opportunities for them to be able to identify what constitutes a good (or poor!) piece of work. Some degree of student involvement in the development and comprehension of assessment criteria is therefore an important component of self-assessment. Developing effective peer and self-assessment takes time and effort. However once fully embedded in learning and teaching, these assessment strategies can be particularly effective in motivating learning. An effective starting point is for teachers to model the process of peer assessment and feedback, for example how to give feedback that is constructive, detailed, linked to assessment criteria, objective, focused etc. Whole-group marking can be a useful method of introducing effective assessment and feedback as it allows for discussion and exchange of ideas. Developing reflective skills provides students with the ability to consider their own performance and to identify their strengths, weaknesses, and areas that require improvement. Students can then to use this knowledge to influence their future work, whether on a programme of study or in employment, by playing to their strengths and/or directing their efforts in areas they have already recognised as needing further improvement. You could consider self-assessment as a teaching and learning exercise, as much as an assessment method and its inclusion within a course provides your students with the opportunity to develop a core lifelong learning skill. Principles and Criteria
1 Boud, D. (1995) Enhancing Learning through Self-Assessment; Kogan Page; London 2 Boud and Falchikov (1989) in Falchikov, N. (2005) Improving Assessment Through Student Involvement: Routledge Falmer; Oxon Last reviewed July 2021 |