There are two schools of thought with regard to peer assessment: One way to look at it is students making judgements and assigning grades to finished pieces of work and hopefully learning something about quality. Peer assessment entails trying to train students to rate written work reliably and to achieve high agreement between the rater and the teacher. The fact that this all comes at the end of teaching and learning when there is no real further opportunity to apply insights and learning makes the whole enterprise summative.
In this form of peer assessment we are concerned only with the end result of work. The focus is on the correct grade and student effort is directed to this aim. We know when marks are assigned, students are not interested in comments. With the award of grades the whole exercise has become very high-stakes. The stakes of the exercise, the awarding of grades, and the timing of the assessment all seem to work to undermine the promise of effective peer assessment. There’s something about this exercise that feels contrived and unnatural to students. It is hard to envisage students ever needing to go through this exercise again in their lives so they may wonder what the payoff for all their hard work is. And it is a lot of work. Even 5% of a course grade does not seem commensurate with the amount of work a student has to put in.
There is another way of looking at peer assessment though; to view it as inseparable from teaching and learning and an integral part of the learning process. This view of assessment and learning accords with what we do outside the classroom in real life. We constantly assess. Am I talking so much in my classroom that students are not getting enough time to interact? Am I spending too much time at work writing on forums when I should be enjoying family time? Is my writing appropriate for the purpose and audience I have in mind? In all these scenarios we are assessing and monitoring what we do, and we make changes while we still can; before the piece of writing is finished, before the semester finishes, before my life finishes. In real life we always assess but we are not always able to do it well. We often need our friends to point out that we talk too much in class or that we’re neglecting our family. Similarly, peers in a classroom can help students judge if their writing is appropriate based on the learning they have done up to that point in the class.
Within the classroom, teachers and students are constantly assessing. Through constant assessment, teachers and students can learn what is not working and what can be done about it. The assessments we make lead directly to improvements. We teach better when we assess that students are struggling with what we’ve taught and we change our lesson plan. Students can also write better when they are frequently assessed, often by peers in a low-stakes environment. Improvements in writing do not only lead to better quality outcomes. They also lead to learning. In our teaching we can learn why a particular classroom activity did not work and learn to do something different another time. In writing, through peer assessment, students can learn what they tend to do poorly and what they might focus on before an assignment is due. The whole process carried out in a way congruent with real life is likely to be a good starting point for thinking about peer assessment.
Peer assessment is most likely to lead to learning when carried out formatively and frequently, in a low-stakes environment, with exemplars to help students come to realize what they’re aiming for, and without grades. It does this in real life so why should it be different in the classroom? If we can show our students that peer assessment helps improve the quality of their work, and there is learning of a real graduate workplace real life skill into the bargain, they are likely to want to give it a try.
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