This post explores some of the research in this area in order to help you understand the possible benefits and issues surround this type of assessment. This guide generally focuses on peer assessment, although many of the points can apply to both. Self and peer assessment uses students evaluation of their own and others work, and/or to take part in the marking and feedback process of that assignment. This type of assessment has been around for many years; it has become easier to organise with recent developments in technology, for instance implementing it with large cohorts. There are many benefits to using this type of assessment, but it should also be recognised that it is not without potential problems. This guide will briefly explore them, for more detail it is recommended you do further reading. An excellent starting place is Chapter 11 of Brown et al (1997) Assessing Student Learning in Higher Education.
Peer and self assessment is not specifically an assessment method, rather it can be considered as a different source of assessment data that can then be used in a variety of different ways. (Brown et al, 1997). Berg et al (2006) have drawn up the different variables that could be considered when designing this type of assessment.
- Focus: Quantitative/summative or qualitative/formative or both?
- Criteria: What is being marked, content, writing skills, referencing, possible plagiarism?
- Objectives for staff: Is it to save time timesaving and/or for the potential educational benefit?
- Official weight: Does the marks contributing to assessees final official grade or not?
- Privacy: Anonymous/confidential/public? Does the assessor know who they are marking and does the assessee know who marked them?
- Year: Are the assessors in a different year of study to the assessers?
- Requirement? Is the activity voluntary or required in some way?
- Product: What form does the mark or assessment take? Tests/marks/grades or writing or oral presentations or other
- Relation to staff assessment: Substitutional or supplementary? Does the peer mark add in some way to the tutors mark or replace it?
- Directionality: One-way, reciprocal, mutual? Is it marked within matched pairs of students, or randomised?
- Contact: Distance or face to face?
- Cross ability or same?
- Reward for doing it? Is there a reward for doing the activity and what form does this take? Eg contributes to final mark.
- Size: How long a piece of work is to be marked?
Adapted from Topology by van den Berg el al (2006)
Within this framework there are numerous different variations on Self and Peer Assessment. Here are other ideas that extend this method further.
In Davis‟s (2004) paper „Don‟t write, just mark‟ one cohort of students‟ main component of assessment in a module is to mark and give feedback for another cohort of students‟ work. The idea being that the activity of assessment work is just as complex an activity as writing an essay. The cohort that assess are then marked on their accuracy and depth of feedback.
Another activity that is promoted as being beneficial to this method, is students devising their own marking criteria (Stefani, 1994). This not only ensures that the criteria is clear to all, but also help students understand the process of marking within Higher Education.
This type of assessment is sometimes linked with assessing group work (Burd, 2003). It is highlighted that students maybe the only ones who know the level of work each group member put in. However students tend not to mark fellow group members down.
This assessment method could also be useful in marking drafts (van den Berg et al, 2006). Lin et al (2001) suggests giving formal roles to help students identify with this activity. This case study used the production of a student peer reviewed journal, with each student playing the role of academic author and peer reviewer. The role provides the student a more objective stance when reviewing their peers work.
Benefits
The benefits for students range over different skills and increased subject knowledge,
Student Skills
- Critical thinking (Brown et al, 1997)
- Task management (ibid)
- Increase in self confidence, (ibid)
- Increase in personal responsibility (ibid)
- Awareness of group dynamics (ibid)
- Abilities to judge own and others work (Stefani, 1994)
- Better understanding of the assessment process, and how to write better essays (Davies, 2004)
Student Knowledge
Deeper learning of subject knowledge
“They [the students] felt that a much better understanding of the subject area was required prior to the actual assessment process taking place. One student made note of the fact that their research continued throughout the marking process and they had often looked up areas that they didn‟t understand whilst progressing through the marking process.”
(Davies, 2004)
“almost 100% of the students said that the scheme [peer assessment] made them think more, 85% said it made them learn more and 97% said that it was challenging. These responses were given despite the fact that 100% of the students said that it was more time consuming and over 75% said that it was hard”
(Stefani, 1994)
Staff
Possible benefits for staff include:
- Generation of timelier feedback, and greater variety for students (Davies, 2004; Collis et al., 2001).
- Increased focus on one piece of work, therefore getting a greater level of learning from one assignment activity.
Issues
The potential educational benefits must be weight against possible issues.
Students
The issues that may affect student involvement in this activity include:
- They may suspect peers‟ ability to mark their work affectively. This is a role they believe only the tutor can perform. This particularly affects those who receive lower scores, leading them to regard peer assessment as inaccurate (McDowell, 1995 Cited in Lin et al 2001).
- To counteract this fear, it can be argued that introducing students to self and peer assessment early in their academic career and using the mark summatively as well as formatively will engender a sense of responsibility in students such that by the time that the grading and ranking of students becomes a crucial matter, for example in the final year of undergraduate training, students will be well accustomed to the procedures.
- Peer assessment tends to appeal to, and benefit students with particular learning style. In Lin et al (2001) study, students with high „executive‟ thinking styles benefited more and produced better feedback. The type of feedback created by the students was also critical to the low „executive‟ thinkers, who benefited more from specific feedback rather than holistic type feedback. The executive learning style is from Sternberg (1998 cited in Lin et al 2001) postulating that individuals who tend to follow regulations and solve problems by designated rules have an „executive‟ thinking style
Staff
- All the students will give each other a high mark, because they dislike being critical of their peers. This seems to depend on how the assessment is organised. Stefani‟s (1994) results goes some way to dispelling fears that lower achievers award themselves higher marks and higher achievers mark themselves down relative to tutor marking
- Fear of handing over assessment power to students (ibid)
- Fear that marks will different significantly from tutors mark (Stefani, 1994; Burd, 2003). If the students are really marking each other‟s work how are we sure of the standard (Stefani, 1994). Robinson (2002) suggests that as much as a third of the feedback provided by students was „inadequate‟.
- Students will lose confidence in peer marking if the difference between marks is significant or if a large proportion of feedback is not relevant. Which leads to a loss of „ an appearance of fairness and objectivity‟ (Robinson 2002).
- Level of usefulness of feedback. Lin et al. (2001) notes that „some students complain that holistic peer feedback was often too vague or useless‟.
Peer assessment process
What follows is a process outlining key events and activities that the research has pointed out as useful for these types of assessment
Presets
- Adequate training in self and peer assessment is given to students (Brown et al, 1997; Devlin 2008)
- The assessment process is clear and known to the students (Brown et al, 1997)
- Tutorials to explore the nature of what is a „good‟ piece of work (Mowl & Pain, 1995)
- The assessment marks reflect the time and effort invested by students (Brown et al, 1997)
- If students are to be involved in anonymous multi-reviewer peer review, they need to be prepared in advance for the varying quality of reviews and varying opinions of reviewers. (Robinson 2002)
- A larger sample size can be a problem (don‟t have too many papers for peers to mark) (Robinson 2002)
- Students need reasonable amount of time to do this task van den Berg el al (2006)
- Falchikov‟s (1994) students derive a criteria, developing a peer-assessment form in sessions before assessment
- Make the feedback anonymous, student do tend to over mark but anonymity takes away dislike of marking each other (Devlin 2008).
- Give them choices of a range of possible feedback to give on specific criteria points (Davies, 2004)
References
Brown, G. Bull, J. and Pendlebury, M., (1997). Assessing Student Learning in Higher Education. London: Routledge.
Burd, S. et al (2003) Using Peer and Self Assessment in Group Work. 4th annual conference of the LTSN centre for information and computer sciences – 2003
Collis, B., De Boer, W. & Slotman, K. (2001) Feedback for web-based assignments, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 17, 306–313.
Davies, P. (2004) Don’t write just mark: the validity of assessing student ability via their computerized peer- marking of an essay rather than their creation of an essay. ALT-J, Research in Learning Technology. 12 (3) 261-277.
Devlin, M. et al (2008) – Improving Assessment in Software Engineering Student Team Projects proceedings of Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Information and Computer Science Conference (Liverpool)
Lin, S. S. J., Liu, E. Z. F. & Yuan, S. M. (2001) Web-based peer assessment: feedback for students with various thinking-styles, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 17, 430–432.
Mowl G. and Pain, R. (1995) Using self and peer-assessment to improve students‟ essay writing: a case from geography‟ innovations in education and training international 32: 324-55
Stefani, L. A. J. (1994) Peer, self and tutor assessment: relative reliabilities, Studies in Higher Education, 19(1), 69–75.
Robinson, J. (2002) In search of fairness: an application of multi-reviewer anonymous peer review in a large class, Journal of Further and Higher Education, 26(2), 183–192.
Van den Berg, el al (2006) Peer assessment in university teaching: evaluating seven course designs Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 19–36