Defining peer assessment

Peer assessment is an educational activity in which students judge the performance of their peers, typically their teammates. Peer assessment takes several forms including

• Summative, where the peer assessment is used to determine a team member’s academic grade or personal result
• Formative, where the peer assessment provides feedback that a team member can use to improve their contribution to the future work of a team in which they are working

Developmental feedback

The ability to give and receive constructive feedback is an essential skill for team members, leaders, and managers.

Consequently, your teacher has chosen to use  Peer Assess Pro™  to help you provide developmental feedback to your team members, for both formative and/or summative purposes.

The goal of developmental feedback is to highlight both positive aspects of performance plus areas for performance improvement. The result of feedback is to increase both individual and team performance (Carr, Herman, Keldsen, Miller, & Wakefield, 2005).

Determination of course personal result

Additionally, your teacher may use the quantitative results calculated by Peer Assess Pro™ to determine your Personal Result for the team work conducted by your team. Your Personal Result may contribute to the final (summative) assessment grade you gain for the course in which Peer Assess Pro™ is applied.

In general, your Personal Result is calculated from two factors:

• Team Result, the overall mark your team earns from its team project outputs, such as reports and presentations
• Peer Assessed Score, a measure of the relative contribution your team members assess that you have made to the team’s delivered outputs, teamwork processes, and/or leadership of the team.

Criteria for peer assessment in Peer Assess Pro™

There are many possible criteria for assessing your contribution to your team’s work. Peer Assess Pro has chosen to place equal weight on two groups of factors based on a well-established instrument devised by Deacon Carr, Herman, Keldsen, Miller, & Wakefield (2005). The two groups of factors are Task Accomplishment, and Contribution to Leadership and Team processes:

• Task Accomplishment: Contributions you make directly to help the team accomplish its task, such as showing initiative, professionalism, contributing ideas, helping other team members learn relevant concepts, and making well-prepared on-time contributions to meetings and team deliverables
• Leadership and Team Processes. Contributions such as focussing the team on priorities, encouraging and welcoming the contributions of others, managing conflict, and chairing meetings productively.

Peer Assess Pro assesses competencies valued by employers

The selection of the criteria used in the Peer Assess Pro is reinforced by the results from a recent survey that asked employers to rate the importance of several competencies they expected to see in new graduates from higher education. The figure shows that teamwork, collaboration, professionalism, and oral communications rate amongst the most highly needed ‘career readiness’ competencies sought by employers. All these competencies rate at least as ‘Essential’, with Teamwork and Collaboration rating almost Absolutely Essential (National Association of Colleges and Employers), 2018). 

Source: National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). (2018). Figure 42, p. 33.

Further information:

Participant    Teams and Teamsets    Group    Peer Assessment   

What is the Purpose of Peer Assessment?   What questions are asked in the peer assessment survey?    How are peer assessment and personal results calculated and defined mathematically?    How is the Peer Assessed (PA) Score calculated?

 Running Peer Assessments from Xorro-Q    Importing Participants, Teams and Groups    How do I view or correct the Team Composition in a running peer assessment activity?    How do I decide on which Personal Result method to apply in my peer assessment activity?

Peer Assess Pro website    Peer Assess Pro Reference Guide (PDF)

References

Deacon Carr, S., Herman, E. D., Keldsen, S. Z., Miller, J. G., & Wakefield, P. A. (2005). Peer feedback. In The Team Learning Assistant Workbook. New York: McGraw Hill Irwin.

National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). (2018). Job Outlook 2019. Bethlehem, PA. https://www.naceweb.org/

Tags: peer assessment.