Supporting Peer Review and Self-Assessment
Self-assessment and peer review activities can foster students' cognitive transition from neophyte to expert by providing metacognition (i.e., the capacity to reflect on and evaluate one's own learning and methods of work) and elaboration opportunities (i.e., the capacity to communicate an understanding, interpretation, or idea to others).
Self-assessment activities prompt a student to step back from a work product or process, reflect on her or his approach, diagnose what she or he is doing well or poorly, identify an appropriate course of action, and apply those lessons to the solution of future problems. One way to encourage metacognition is to provide ungraded pre-conceived or scripted self-assessment activities at crucial points in the learning process, or to require students to submit reflections of this sort in tandem with their solutions to an assignment.
Peer review activities cast students in the role of teachers by asking them to read and evaluate a fellow student's work. Such activities require reviewers to apply the knowledge and experience they've gained in class and in producing their own work. These activities also engage students in the cognitive process of elaboration by having them relate their criticisms and advice to someone else, an activity demonstrated in the literature to improve the learning of its practitioners. The student whose work is critiqued receives the benefit of comments and recommendations from multiple teachers, which may lead, in turn, to increased sensitivity to the needs and expectations of diverse audiences.
In addition to these cognitive benefits, appropriately structured peer review and self-assessment activities (e.g., those that include a clearly worded and explained asessment rubric) can help students learn professional standards and practices and afford opportunities to apply them in realistic settings.
The process of self assessment and peer review is usually done by outlining specific scoring criteria. Students benefit from this process more than the traditional process of handing in a project and receiving a grade from an instructor for the following reasons.
- Students are given explicit criteria by which work in their field is judged.
- Students practice critiquing work in their field by those criteria.
- Students learn to evaluate their own work and note progress and areas that need improvement.
- Teachers have a more reliable, meaningful, and helpful process for evaluating student work.
Put simply, this process is more like most professional work, which is developed as a series of drafts with significant cycles of feedback and revision.
Activities
Some of the ways instructors can support peer review and self-assessment include the following.
- Have students write essays, reports, or other papers, submit them for review, and make revisions based on weaknesses identified and comments made by their peers.
- Have students critique one another's work and justify their critique with the established criteria.
- Have students write reflective self-assessments, note the strengths and weaknesses of a project, and either plan revisions or indicate strategies for self-improvement and professional growth.
Teaching Tips
The following suggestions might help instructors teach with peer review and self-assessment activities.
- Have students help develop the scoring criteria for peer review activities. Students should identify major dimensions of the project, describe benchmarks for excellence (or 'A' work) for each dimension, and then describe 'B' and 'C' level work.
- Provide sample papers for practice reviews before the formal activity. Some instructors submit their own works in progress, to promote the feeling of peer review as collegial support.
Technologies
Instructors can use the Moodle Workshop tool to support robust peer review and/or self-assessment activities, as well as cycles of feedback on—and revision of—student work. There are a range of ways that instructors can set up these reviews, from enabling only the submission of comments to supporting the use of a sophisticated scoring rubric with several dimensions.
Examples
We created the following example scenarios to illustrate how instructors might incorprate peer review and self-assessment into a course.
Adding a New Workshop Activity
An instructor could set up a Workshop activity in Moodle by following these steps:
- Turn the editing mode on.
- Select a Workshop activity under the "Add Activity" drop-down list in your course site.
- This will bring you to the "Adding a new Workshop" settings page. To get an explanation of various options, select the question mark icons next to options.
Assessing One's Own and Peers' Work
The instructor would like students to write short response papers about poems they have read for a literature class, and then assess their own papers and the papers of two peers. To ensure that they understand the assignment and the scoring criteria, the instructor also will provide an example paper and require students to assess it before submitting their own papers. To set up this activity, the instructor follows these steps:
Figures 1 and 2: Determining how criteria will be considered in scoring an assignment.
- Identify the number of assessment elements, or the various criteria by which the assignment will be judged, and what the grading scheme will be, by choosing the appropriate settings on the Moodle "Adding a new Workshop" settings page. In this case, the instructor decides that students will make comments based on three elements (see Figure 2), but they will not assign numeric scores to these elements (see Figure 1).
Figure 3: Enabling an instructor example. - Set the "Number of Assessments of Examples from Teacher" to "1" or more (see Figure 3).
- Because the self-assessment counts toward the number of assessments a student must do, set the "Number of Assessments of Student Submissions" to "3" (see Figure 4) and "self-assessment" to "Yes" (see Figure 5).
Figures 4 and 5: Enabling self-assessment and peer review of student assignments. - Set the due dates for submissions and assessments. The dates must be after the current date.
Figure 6: A portion of the screen describing assessment elements (see an enlargement). - Save the Workshop activity. Moodle will load the assessment elements form in edit mode. This is the list of assessment criteria (see Figure 6). Enter descriptions of the elements on this form. In a graded assignment, the instructor also would define weights for each element.
Resources
The following sources may help you use and teach with this type of tool.
Using Moodle book: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Using_Moodle_book
Although this book was written for an earlier version of Moodle, much of the content in the chapter on the Workshop tool is still relevant to the current version.
Research
The following research literature has been published about this kind of activity.
Dossin, Mary Mortimore. "Among Friends: Effective Peer Critiquing." The Clearing House 76, no. 4 (March–April 2003): 206–207.
Although focused on peer evaluation in the face-to-face classroom, Dossin's review provides useful information on situating peer critique in the context of an iterative process of composition, reflection. and revision. It also includes a description of the motivating (or de-motivating!) power of such critiques. One of Dossin's subjects describes the best peer critiques as taking place in an instructional context that is "emotionally comfortable and intellectually uncomfortable" (p. 207); i.e., in an environment in which students are not judged for mechanical errors and stylistic weaknesses but in which they should be prepared to have their ideas and arguments challenged.
Fallows, S., and B. Chandramohan. "Multiple Approaches to Assessment: Reflections on Use of Tutor, Peer, and self-assessment." Teaching in Higher Education 6, no. 2 (2001): 229–246.
The authors describe the introduction of peer review and self-assessment activities to complement tutor-assessment activities in an undergraduate literature class, and use reflections by students to conclude that peer review and self-assessment activities improve performance, and are more motivating to students than tutor-assessment activities.
Shaw, Victor N.. "Peer Review as a Motivating Device in the Training of Writing Skills for College Students." Journal of College Reading and Learning 33, no. 1 (Fall 2002): 68–76.
Shaw describes a substantial peer instruction/peer critique activity that would map very nicely to the Moodle Workshop tool, in either a hybrid or fully distance setting. In this activity, Shaw divides students into teams of six; each team must complete the following tasks:
- Take responsibility for one of six modules that constitute the course. This responsibility generally takes the form of presenting course material and leading a discussion on two of the five days devoted to the module; collaboratively grading classmates' exams over the course of a single week based on a rubric and standard essay responses provided by the instructor; and leading a panel discussion in which the team members provide a meta-analysis of the class's work, describe their procedures and standards, and answers questions from the class.
- Resolve any grading disputes that may arise over the course of a week after the conclusion of the module.
The student instructional teams receive two assessments: Their fellow students grade them on the quality of their didactic presentations and discussion leadership (again based on an instructor-supplied rubric) and they receive the average of the grades they assign their classmates on the exam. One particularly interesting outcome noted by Shaw was the emergence of a competitive dynamic that served to drive up the quality of students' writing—whereas students showed no qualms about submitting poor quality work to the instructor, they were reticent to turn over such work to their peers (pp. 72–73).
Vega, Quinn C., and Marilyn R. Tayler. "Incorporating Course Content While Fostering a More Learner-Centered Environment." College Teaching 53, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 83–86.
Vega and Tayler report on the findings of a two-week summer symposium on democratic classroom practices. The authors situate their concept of peer evaluation—focused, in this instance, primarily on one-to-one interaction—in relation to a spectrum of activities that includes small group collaborative writing and problem-solving and whole class communities of inquiry.
