In the September edition of Edubytes, our guest editors from the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology (CTLT), Bosung Kim, PhD; Isabeau Iqbal, PhD; and Jason Myers have curated the first part of this edition where they will be exploring peer assessment. Bosung is an educational consultant in learning design, Isabeau is a senior educational consultant in educational leadership, and Jason works as a faculty liaison with the Faculty of Arts.
Student peer assessment is a broad term for a range of activities that engage students in the act of evaluating and providing feedback on the work of other students.
Research shows that peer assessment activities can have many benefits for student learning, these include: receiving more frequent feedback than when the instructor or teaching assistants are the only ones providing it; enabling writing activities in large classes where grading wouldn’t be logistically possible; and engaging students in the act of critical review instead of being passive recipients of feedback (Liu and Carless 2006; Cartney 2010; Nicol 2011).
Students can engage with peer assessment in many ways. It can be formative, where students give feedback on the drafts of their peers and revise their work before submitting it for instructor grading. It can also be summative, when students use a rubric to assign grades to other students. Peer assessment is also commonly used to evaluate individual group member contributions in collaborative projects.
The following articles provide greater depth about peer assessment.
Teaching and Learning Services: Peer Assessment
Are you interested in implementing peer assessment but don’t know where to start? This site has a rich set of resources for learning about, and implementing, student peer assessment organized into three categories: peer assessment of other students’ assignment, peer assessment of contributions to teamwork, and cases of peer assessment at McGill University.
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Using Peer Review to Help Students Improve Their Writing
Thinking about requiring students to review and provide feedback to one another’s writing? This site discusses common challenges that instructors often encounter when incorporating peer review into their courses and provides key strategies to overcome them. In particular, if you are planning to run in-class peer review sessions, check out Planning and Guiding In-Class Peer Review which provides guidelines on what needs to be done before, during and after in-class peer-review sessions and how these can be structured, run and facilitated. Read through Commenting on Student Writing for tips and suggestions on how to prepare students for peer review.
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Peer Assessment Training Workshop Resource Site
Providing students with assessment criteria is not enough for them to properly critique their peers’ work. Prior to engaging in peer assessment, students must be given a chance to develop an understanding of the criteria and learn how to provide specific and constructive feedback.
The Peer Assessment Training (PAT) online module template, developed at UBC with support from the Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund, presents a way to prepare students—particularly those in large classes—for peer assessment using sample assignments.
Access the demo course to look at the PAT workshop template from students’ perspectives, and import the template to your course site in Canvas following this step-by-step guide if you are ready to develop one for your course.
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UBC Resources on Student Peer Assessment
For UBC-generated resources including handouts and helpful links, visit the UBC Wiki page for Student Peer Assessment. For a thorough summary of peer assessment, check out Ideas and Strategies for Peer Assessment.
There are many tools which support peer assessment activities. Some commonly used tools at UBC are Canvas Peer Review; ComPAIR, for providing feedback through comparison of two peer answers; iPeer, for peer assessment on the contribution to group work; peerScholar, for instructors who want to ask students to assess the work of peers, reflect on the feedback received and/or resubmit the work; and Collaborative Learning Annotation System, for a peer feedback activity on videos, audios, images and pdfs made by students. The Summary of Peer-Based Assessment Tools and Peer-Based Assessment – Comparison Chart can help instructors understand the affordability and limitations of each tool.
Enjoyed reading about Peer Assessment? Learn about other topics we covered in the September 2019 edition by reading the complete Edubytes newsletter. To view past issues, visit the Edubytes archive.
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