Leveraging the Power of Peer Assessment

This webinar took place on Jan 29, 2021

Teachers spend countless hours correcting our students’ work only to have these comments set aside as irrelevant, or worse yet, left unread. We spend this time correcting because we know that feedback is critical to students’ learning process. So how can we get students to understand the important learning that happens when they interact with feedback given during assessment activities? One answer is to have students engage in the process themself, this approach is considered Peer Assessment.

Peer Assessment is “an arrangement in which individuals consider the amount, level, value, worth, quality, or success of the products or outcomes of learning of peers of similar status.” (Topping, 1998). More simply, Peer Assessment is an activity in which students evaluate work submitted by their peers with the aim/goal of providing meaningful feedback. This provides students with direct experience with: (1) understanding the standards that are being used by the teacher/institution, the class, the discipline (often requiring the use of a rubric); and (2) the criteria used to measure the level and quality of the work being evaluated, related to these standards.

Peer Assessment differs from typical forms of peer grading in that it focuses more on feedback and improvement and less on merely assigning grades – i.e., it’s a formative type of assessment. It is also a mutual and reciprocal process in that students both give and receive feedback. Research shows clear benefits of peer assessment exercises in that it prompts students to reflect and engage with the assessment criteria and standards on a deep level. Typically, the student giving feedback learns as much as the student receiving the feedback, and sometimes even more than because assessment is a reflexive process. In addition, this approach fosters development of the metacognitive and self-regulatory skills and knowledge required to understand and to act on feedback students received – from the teacher and/or peers. This being a major goal of the peer assessment approach for teachers.

In this webinar we will describe the Peer Assessment approach and provide X examples, taken from real implementations in university and college classrooms. Each case will demonstrate a different example of exercises that range from highly structured to open activity, and describe the digital tools used to facilitate such goals. Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions and engage in discussion with the presenters.