Working with peer assessment is not always simple. We will now discuss the most prominent problems and how they can be addressed.
The students exhibit resistance to peer assessment
At first, students may feel insecure or awkward in the assessment of fellow students. This can generate resistance or limited cooperation. It is therefore important to ensure that students are well prepared. The following matters could be communicated at the beginning:
How will the peer assessment be weighted in the final score? In other words, to what extent will the peer assessment score be able to influence the final outcome?
- Which peer assessment system will be used (preferably with an example; see ‘To learn more’ for further inspiration on the various systems)?
- According to which criteria will students assess each other, and what exactly do these criteria entail?
- What will happen if students should withdraw or if conflict should arise within the group?
Another reason for resistance to peer assessment is that the peer assessment is not sufficiently integrated into the learning process. If students assess each other but no further attention is paid to these assessments or their quality, students will also attach less importance to them. Sufficient attention should therefore be devoted to processing the peer assessment or communicating them back to the class as a whole.
The quality of the assessments by students is substandard
Two forms of peer assessment can be distinguished. Students can assess their fellow students on their collaboration in group work, or they can provide each other with substantive feedback. To ensure the quality of the assessments, it is important to build up the use of peer assessment gradually throughout the programme. This will allow students to be trained in giving assessments, in addition to making the process rules for giving assessments explicit. For example, some programmes give workshops on working in groups and coping with group conflicts, thereby supporting the acquisition of team competences. The following is one possible example of training students in giving substantive feedback. According to the basic principles of giving feedback, students who assess the quality of their fellow students’ written products learn that they should always start by detecting the problem in the text and then establish a diagnosis of the problem and propose a remedy:
- Not: ‘Your text is not structured properly’.
- But: ‘The structure of the text has room for improvement’ (detection); ‘the structure plays a decisive role in bringing out the argumentation in a strong way’ (diagnosis); ‘specifically, you can do this by addressing the structure as follows … and restructuring the subsequent sections as follows … ’ (remedy).
It has been demonstrated that the reliability of student assessments is enhanced considerably when students have been trained first. In addition to training the students, they (or their products) could always be assessed by two or more students. Teachers can also review a sample of a few products and assessments and discuss the most common errors in products and/or feedback briefly with the entire class. It is also becoming increasingly common for teachers to address the quality of peer assessments in the final assessment. In such cases, students do have the opportunity to practice this first (formative).
Friend-enemy politics are at play
Peer assessments can also be influenced by friend-enemy politics, which can result in distorted assessments. There are several ways in which to address this problem. Depending on the system that is used for weighting the peer assessment in the final total, extreme peer assessments can be filtered out. If the problems with friend-enemy politics within the group cannot be resolved, a consultation can be planned between the teacher and the group. Setting up a consultation session can also be a possible approach to use if students think that that the peer assessments that they have received are not justified. In general, experience has shown that the majority of these problems can be reduced considerably by using peer assessment in a formative manner before using the summative variant.
Want to know more?
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Gielen, S. (2007). Peer assessment as a tool for learning. Doctoral thesis. Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences.
Gielen, S., Peeters, E., Dochy, F., Onghena, P., & Struyven, K. (2010). Improving the effectiveness of peer feedback for learning. Learning and Instruction, 20(4), 304-315.
Hayes, J.R., Flower, L.S., Schriver, K.A., Stratman, J., & Carey, L. (1987). Cognitive processes in revision. In S. Rosenberg (Ed.), Advances in psycholinguistics: Reading, writing, and language processing (Vol. 2, pp. 176-240). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sluijsmans, D. (2002). Student involvement in assessment: The training of peer-assessment skills. Proefschrift Open Universiteit Heerlen.
Topping, K. J. (2009). Peer Assessment. Theory Into Practice, 48(1), 20-27.
van Zundert, M., Sluijsmans, D., & van Merriënboer, J. (2010). Effective peer assessment processes: Research findings and future directions. Learning and Instruction, 20(4), 270-279.