What are the challenges of self and peer assessment in/for a digital world?
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The ability to evaluate our own work, and that of others is a critical skill in a contemporary society. Especially in workplaces, it is not often that we get feedback from our supervisors, on every single piece of work that we do. But to produce good work, we need to be able to understand what good or bad work looks like. Apply that standard and evaluate our own work and our peers work. So in the literature, this is referred to as evaluative judgment skills. In self and peer assessment we are able to develop such important skillsets in our students, but given that this assessment approach involves handing over the power of assessors, traditionally, the teachers, to the usual assessed, our students, there is a fair bit of anxiety and uncertainty for many teachers and students.
In online learning environments especially where visual cues and other forms of immediate feedback are not readily available, this can become even more complex. But thinking about the world that we live in, and working with the abundance of information online, cultivating evaluative judgment skills and developing critical thinkers, in and for a digital world, is ever more important. So let’s have a look at specific strategies that can facilitate good design and delivery of this innovative assessment approach.
Historically, self and peer assessment practices are regarded as non-traditional and innovative assessment practices. There is a concern around how or why students – who are novices in the discipline – need to be given the power of becoming an assessor, as opposed to being the ones who are assessed (the ‘usual assessed’). This is especially the case for summative assessments where stakes and risks are high.
Research shows that students themselves have concerns about performing the critical role of the assessor such as (i) understanding a set of standards (e.g., rubrics) and (ii) applying the standards in order to give constructive feedback. Students can be anxious that getting these tasks wrong will have an impact on their grades and thus graduate success, particularly where summative assessments are concerned.
Self and peer assessment is even more complicated when it is transferred into online environments as the EdTech market is only now developing tools that allow complex and dynamic assessment processes to take place effectively.
Existing literature also talks about student reluctance to undertake group tasks and teamwork projects, whether online or offline, and dissatisfaction with these tasks and projects. This is largely because typically a group mark is awarded by an educator on the output of group work, rather than on the individual contributions and/or the process of how teamwork occurred during such projects. There is also the issue of ‘free riders,’ i.e., where students get the same mark as others even though there is an un-even distribution and quality of the work completed.
Finally, some disciplines are more attuned to the practice of self and peer assessment than others. For example, within practice-based disciplinary areas such as clinical subjects, education and architecture, evaluative judgements and the practice of assessing their own and peers’ work and giving feedback is considered vital, so some disciplines have a more natural ‘fit’ than others.
Discussions
What challenges have you faced when implementing self and peer assessment practices in your context?
Please share your thoughts and questions in the comments section below.