TEDI conferences: Brief briefing: Peer and self assessment

Brief briefing: Peer and self assessment
by
Geoff Isaacs
The Teaching and Educational Development Institute The University of Queensland

What are peer and self assessment?
Self assessment is a process where the creator of an assessable piece of work is responsible for assessing it. Peer assessment involves the assessment of a piece of assessable work by one of the creator's peers. Two people are peers if they are in some sense in the same situation. For example, two students in the same class or studying the same subject may be peers for our purposes. Then peer assessment in a subject becomes the assessment of a student's work by another student studying the same subject.
Why do it?
Self assessment often is recommended:

to help students to examine their own work critically, taking an "outsider's" point of view and applying assessment criteria either supplied by or negotiated with the teacher;
to help students to improve their own work by looking at it somewhat dispassionately after they feel it might be complete;
as a way to provide some feedback to students on their work without imposing too heavy an additional burden on the teaching staff;
as a way of ascribing a mark or grade to a student's work for summative purposes.

Peer assessment seems to be useful:

to help students to get some feedback on their assessable work from someone other than themselves or the teaching staff;
to provide students with some insight into the criteria to be used for marking a piece of assessable work;
to allow students to see the work being done by some other students on the same piece of assessable work (applies when all in a class are involved in assessing each others' work);
as a way to provide some feedback to students on their work without imposing too heavy an additional burden on the teaching staff;
as a way of ascribing a mark or grade to a student's work for summative purposes;
To help assign a mark to an individual for their part in a group task.

How to do it
Students need training, at least to some extent, in assessing work, especially if in your subject they are encountering peer or self assessment for the first time. If you know that they have been trained in assessment in some similar or cognate subject then the amount of practice or training needed may be considerably less.
"Training" the students to assess
Each of these techniques is almost impossible to implement unless the assessment task is criterion referenced -- norm referenced assessment assumes that the marker is familiar with the standards achieved by other students. This would be very difficult to achieve when there are a substantial number of markers each responsible for only a small number of scripts.
Assuming that you plan to use criterion-referenced assessment, the students will need to understand and be able to apply the criteria to the work they are assessing. In some situations you may have negotiated the criteria with the class; in such a case there may be little problem in having students grasp and apply the criteria. In other situations the criteria may be those of the teaching staff, in which case it may be necessary to work through some examples with the class and/or to provide students of exemplars of work of various standards.
Students may be especially in need of some practice and training in giving effective feedback on work. Effective feedback ideally satisfies three conditions:

it tells the recipient what is "right" or "good" about their work;
it tells the recipient what is "wrong" or "bad" about their work;
it tells the recipient how they might start remedying the defects in their work, or simply improving it, without compromising its strengths.

Should the students be doing a summative assessment of their own or their peers' work then they may also need some training in applying standards to work assessed according to some criterion and to deriving a grade from assessments on various criteria.
Doing the assessment
Once the students have had a chance to learn and to practice the relevant skills of applying criteria, giving feedback, and applying standards and deriving grades from them most of the other tasks are to do with logistics. The assessment task involves:

getting the papers to the students who will do the marking (obviously not a problem with self assessment);
communicating the criteria and, where relevant, the standards to students;
organising an occasion for the marking to be done or a deadline by which it must be completed;
collecting and distributing feedback and, where relevant, grades (and recording the grades).

The logistic complexities of peer assessment once students are allowed to take the work to be assessed out of the classroom should not be underestimated. Just as students frequently (and for all sorts of reasons) hand in assessable work after the due date, so are some likely to be dilatory or delinquent in their assessment task. Thus one question that needs to be answered is what kind of incentive can be offered to students to complete their assessments on time. Another is how much time is to be devoted (and by whom) to retrieval of marked work and recording what has happened. Some practitioners go so far as to make the completion of a peer assessment a condition of passing their subject.
There are some decisions to be taken before starting this process. For example, are the assessors to know whose paper they are marking? Are the students to know who marked their paper? If the answer to these questions is affirmative, then are the students to be provided with an opportunity to discuss "their" feedback or grade with "their" marker?
Doing it
One effective way to gain some appreciation of the way self or peer assessment affects students is to try them out. Here is one way of doing so...
Devise a criterion referenced assessment task

Before you try it you will need to devise a criterion referenced assessment task for the class. This means defining criteria against which students' work will be assessed, setting standards for each criterion, and associating feedback with each standard on each criterion. If the assessment is also to be summative, then you will need to set out how to go from a particular profile for achievement on all the criteria to a grade or some similar summative judgement.

Use a task that can be marked in a class session

For this exploratory task set an assessment exercise which realistically can be marked during a class session. This will minimise logistic problems.

Use a tutorial for "training"

You may need to set aside a further class session -- generally a tutorial session -- to discuss the criteria and to look at some examples and the kinds of feedback that might be given on them.

Debrief the students and yourself

After the students have completed the task probably you will want to debrief them on the exercise. This is likely to include a discussion of the merits, problems and issues they see after being involved in the process. This might happen by discussion with the whole class group, by discussion in tutorials or by some structured method such as using a questionnaire or the nominal group technique. It may be interesting to ask the students whether they felt the exercise contributed to their learning in your subject and, if so, how it did so.

Brief annotated bibliography

Abstracts with sources in parentheses - "(Author/MLW" - are from the ERIC database. Other annotations by Geoff Isaacs.

Boud, D. (1989) The Role of Self-Assessment in Student Grading. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 14(1), 20-30.
Boud, D. (1990) Assessment and the Promotion of Academic Values. Studies in Higher Education; v15 n1 p101-11 1990
Abstract: Many current assessment practices are incompatible with the goals of independence, thoughtfulness and critical analysis; common forms of assessment are not consistent with the behavior of academics in their own contributions to knowledge; and the assessment policy of many departments undermines approaches to learning. (Author/MLW)

Boud, D. (1995). Enhancing Learning Through Self-Assessment. (1st ed.). London: Kogan Page.
A very comprehensive book on self assessment, with an extensive bibliography. It includes a theoretical framework, six chapters of examples of practice (including some work on students' views of self assessment and its benefits/deficits, a review of work on self assessment and marking (much of which was carried out or reviewed elsewhere by Boud and Falchikov, and a discussion of the design, implementation and evaluation of self assessment schemes in higher and adult education. This is a seminal work in the field.

Boud, D. & Falchikov, N. (1989) Quantitative Studies of Student Self-Assessment in Higher Education: A Critical Analysis of Findings. Higher Education; v18 n5 p529-49 1989
Abstract: The comparison of student-generated marks with those generated by teachers is discussed. Studies including such comparisons in the context of higher education courses are reviewed. Methodological issues in studies of this type are discussed and recommendations concerning the analysis are offered. (Author/MLW)

Boyd, H. & Cowan, J. (1985) A Case for Self-Assessment Based on Recent Studies of Student Learning. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education; v10 n3 p225-35 Fall 1985
Abstract: An experiment in self-assessed learning in which college students set their own goals weekly and prepare a self-assessment open to discussion by peers encountered some problems but was found to be the only method of achieving "deep," as contrasted with "surface," learning in higher education. (MSE)

Conway, R., Kember, D., Sivan, A., & Wu, M. (1993). Peer assessment of an individual's contribution to a group project. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 18(1), 45-56.
Abstract: In response to optometry student complaints about group scores as an inadequate reflection of individual effort, two different procedures for assessing individual contributions to a group learning project were investigated, one based on evaluations by students outside the group and one using student evaluations of their fellow group members' contributions. Advantages and disadvantages are discussed. (MSE)

Earl, S. E. (1986). Staff and peer assessment - measuring an individual's contribution to group performance. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 11(1), 60-69.
Falchikov, N. (1986). Product comparisons and process benefits of collaborative peer and self-assessments. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 11(4), 146-166.
Abstract: Student self-evaluation and peer evaluation are compared with traditional student assessment methods in terms of reliability and the possible effects on learning and personal development, and the results of a program of self- and peer evaluation are reported. (MSE)

Fazey, D.M.A. (1993) Self-Assessment as a Generic Skill for Enterprising Students: The Learning Process. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education; v18 n3 p235-50 1993
Abstract: It is argued that self-assessment skills, used for planning and monitoring achievement, must be taught to college students. One method, use of a personal diary of progress, is described and illustrated. An alternative or complementary procedure for teaching self-assessment skills, which can be used with large groups, is also outlined. (MSE)

Freeman, M. (1995). Peer assessment by groups of group work. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 20(3), 289-300.
Fry, S.A. (1990) Implementation and Evaluation of Peer Marking in Higher Education. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education; v15 n3 p177-89 Fall 1990
Abstract: A peer evaluation experiment in a British polytechnic institute found peer grading correlated positively with teacher grading. A survey of participants (n=70) found that five advantages of peer marking had been achieved and that students believed their work had been marked fairly and the marks should count toward final grades. (Author/MSE)

Goldfinch, J., & Raeside, R. (1990). Development of a peer assessment technique for obtaining individual marks on a group project. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 15(3), 210-231.
Mowl, G., and Pain, R. (1995) Using self and peer assessment to improve students' essay writing: a case study from Geography. Innovations in Education and Training International, 32(4), 324 - 335.
Oldfield, K.A., and Macalpine, J.M.K. (1995) Peer and Self-Assessment at the Tertiary Level--An Experiential Report. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 20(1), 125-32.
Abstract: A two-stage process for college student evaluation that combines peer assessment with self-assessment is described, and experience with it is discussed. Several necessary features are highlighted and include assessment made in steps that are absorbable and achievable by students; building student confidence from experience; and providing feedback at each stage. (MSE)

Rafic, Y., & Fullerton, H. (1996). Peer assessment of group projects in civil engineering. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 21(1), 69-81.
Sadler, D.R. (1993) Evaluation and the Improvement of Academic Learning. Journal of Higher Education; v54 n1 p60-79 Jan-Feb 1983
Abstract: The role of evaluation in improving academic performance is explored. A theoretical development of formative evaluation in higher education and a critique of higher education in the light of that theory is presented. Grading, feedforward, feedback, course length, and cumulative assessment are discussed. (Author/MLW)

Stefani, L. A. J. (1992). Comparison of collaborative self, peer and tutor assessment in a biochemistry practical. Biochemical Education, 20(3), 148-151.
Abstract: A look at using self and peer evaluation as a means for feedback and summative assessment (giving grades) in a biochemistry practical class. Correlations between three modes of assessment (tutor, peer and self) are examined as are students' reactions to the peer and self assessment methods (using a questionnaire due to Falchikov) (GI)

Stefani, L. A. J. (1994). Peer, self and tutor assessment: relative reliabilities. Studies in Higher Education, 19(1), 69-75.
A further report of the study described in Biochemical Education. The focus is similar. (GI)

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