Developing evaluative judgement through peer review in assessment

Evaluative judgement is an important skill for students to develop in preparation for success after study. Dr Mark Dodd (School of Economics and Public Policy) explains how his assessment design develops students’ capability to accept, and give, constructive feedback.

Evaluative judgement is defined as the ability to make decisions about the quality of one's own work and that of others (Tai, et al 2018). The development of this skill assists students in overcoming the gap between their own work as novices and the standard that they are aiming to achieve as effective practitioners. Making evaluative judgements about the work of others is a powerful learning activity and develops skills that are highly regarded in the workplace (Tai et al, 2018).

One way to enable students to develop evaluative judgement is by designing learning and/or assessment tasks in which students review each other’s work and provide formative feedback. Dr Mark Dodd, Senior Lecturer in Economics, AEA Co-Chair, HERDSA Fellow and Senior Advance HE Fellow, implemented peer review processes within the assignments in his first year undergraduate course in 2022.

‘Students in the Principles of Economics course had the option to complete five peer review assignments’ Mark explains. ‘The assignments have a formative purpose which allows the students to practice and progress towards achieving the learning outcomes’.

The learning task includes not only the completion of an assigned written task, but also the reviewing of other students' submissions, and reflecting on the feedback received.

‘Having the opportunity to view a peer’s attempt at the same task allows students to more deeply understand the assessment criteria. This then means that students can evaluate, and where needed, improve on, their own submission’ says Mark. Within his course, peer reviewers were allocated at random, and anonymised from the student's perspective. Only students who submitted the initial task are able to take part in the review phase.Mark Dodd

‘I used the Feedback Fruits Peer Review tool within Canvas to automate the administration of the process’ explains Mark. ‘I have about 400 students and over 200 of these completed a review, so Feedback Fruits helps make peer review a manageable approach.’

For each of the five peer assessments, students log into the tool and it guides them through each required step, including the task where they anonymously score and comment on two randomly assigned student submissions. Each student can see the scores and comments coming from an anonymous reviewer with a fruit name as an alias. The scoring, collating and averaging the data is performed automatically by the tool.

Students were broadly positive regarding their experience with the peer review task, and its impact on their learning. Based on an informal survey during one semester of the course, 67.9% of respondents agreed that they believe they performed better on other summative written tasks because they undertook the peer assessment task. Many students reported that the experience evaluating others on the assessment’s grading rubric helped them to better understand the assessment criteria on which they themselves were assessed.

Read more about how the Feedback Fruits Peer Review tool enables the use of peer review ad feedback in assignments.