Peer assessment: why doesn’t it appear to work?

Peer assessment is often promoted as a beneficial strategy for student learning. There are concerns, however, about its effectiveness. Students are often underwhelmed with the experience and teachers sometimes wonder whether it is worth the effort. So why does peer assessment often not work? The lack of success of many attempts to implement peer assessment is, I believe, largely a question of teachers’ beliefs and understandings. To many teachers, peer assessment, like feedback and exemplar use, is a technical skill to be mastered. Once we know how to do it, we can add it to our existing teaching and derive the maximum benefits from it. Yet, peer assessment is not a task or a skill, but rather an approach to helping students learn for themselves. It is therefore not just technical but empowering. But a peer assessment task or feedback given to students is not empowering if and of itself. It becomes empowering when the attitude and belief of the teacher is that students can and should be able to identify what they need to learn, what good quality looks like and learning what they can do to turn their work into good quality. This empowerment needs to occur consistently through a teacher’s teaching, not just when it comes to feedback or a peer assessment task. How can we know as teachers whether we are being empowering? If we are doing peer assessment right, the assessor is learning more than the assessed. The assessor has come to appreciate what quality is and can see where peers’ work is falling short in comparison. Being able to ‘assess’ the quality for themselves is the real learning that comes from peer assessment. But this won’t come from just doing one peer assessment task. Empowering students to assess for themselves needs to be a core aim of all our teaching.