Bitesize Research: Effective Peer Assessment

By Jaya Carrier

I hope you’re all having a great week so far. As part of our work around assessment, I was interested to come across a recent Edutopia article about effective peer assessment.

Objectives: To consider the barriers and strategies for effective peer assessment 

Summary: 

• The author argues that effective peer assessment has a large number of benefits including enabling more time for low stakes assessments and independent practice, as well as ensuring greater degrees of accountability from students.

• The author argues that one of the barriers to effective peer assessment is that sometimes adolescents can be sensitive to criticism and that they can worry about critiquing the work of their friends. To combat this, she argues that scaffolding the process of peer assessment and ensuring a safe and secure classroom is essential. 

• The author goes on to make six recommendations for effective peer assessment practice:

1. Focus on reflection on correction - in particular, encourage students to give their peers very clear next steps about how to improve

2. Create feedback partners - which ensures that adolescent social dynamics do not impede impactful feedback

3. Offer choice - this could include different prompts or sentence starters based around common mistakes or areas for development

4. Specificity is important - emphasise the idea that feedback needs to be constructive and precise

5. Model effective feedback - verbally or using sentence starters

6. Harness deeper engagement - consider how you can use starters such as ‘I wish, I like, I wonder’ rather than getting students to focus on spelling, punctuation or grammar errors. 

How does this impact me and my practice?: Some reflections arising from this that might be helpful to consider are: 

• What is important about peer assessment to me? For my subject? For my classes?

• Which of the 6 recommendations am I currently doing well? Which would I like to learn more about and implement further? 

• What opportunities are there for me to use these strategies with my students?

If you would like to discuss this further with me please get in touch! I’d be delighted to hear from you