Group work is a powerful way for students to learn, but it only works well when everyone feels the process is fair. By including peer evaluation, you give your students a voice in the grading process. This makes them more accountable to one another and helps you recognize individual effort as well as team or group achievements.
Peer accountability
Students know what happens inside their groups. They see who shows up, who contributes ideas and who helps the team stay on track. Peer evaluation is a mechanism you can use to empower students. It also address two main challenges instructors face with group work:
- Providing tools that allow students to hold each other accountable in a supportive and growth-focused way.
- Assessing individual contributions and effort within group projects.
Peer feedback is most effective when the evaluation criteria is co-created with students.
Co-create peer feedback criteria
Early in the semester, ask students to work individually or in their groups to identify what makes a good teammate. Students will often cite behaviour such as:
- show up every time
- come prepared
- do the reading
- don't hold back if you know something useful
- listen
- be respectful when disagreeing
Once you have brainstormed, work as a class to narrow the list down to 3-5 core criteria. These will be the criteria every group will use to evaluate their peer's contributions. Choosing a manageable set of criteria and keeping it the same across all groups is important. Too many criteria can make it hard for students to give and receive meaningful feedback. If each group has different criteria, it will be harder for you to administer feedback events and support students.
Set up opportunities for peer feedback through the semester
Feedback is most helpful when students have time to make changes. Instead of a single peer evaluation at the end of a semester or project, give your students mid-way check ins. This gives students time to adjust their own behaviour within the group before you assign any grades for their team work.
Consider using an anonymous peer feedback option like iPeer to collect feedback. This will allow you to ensure feedback is collegial and productive before you share it with students.
Reward individual effort
There are two main ways to include peer feedback in your grading:
- make peer assessment a small, stand-alone part of the final course grade
- adjust the score of a specific group project based on peer assessment
Typically, peer assessment will make up 5-10 percent of a student's grade. This is enough to be important, but not enough to determine if a student will pass or fail the course or project.
Set rules for meaningful point distribution
Students are sometimes reluctant to give different points across their peer group. You can help by creating a rule for how they distribute points. For example, you can state that no two students can receive the same number of points.
You can also make this less stressful by increasing the number of points they can distribute. Students will feel freer distributing 100 points than 20 across peers.
Be clear about what students are evaluating
You are not asking students to evaluate the academic performance of their peers. Academic evaluation is your responsibility as the instructor. You are asking students to evaluate peer contributions, behaviour and attitude. These are elements of group productivity that only students can fairly evaluate.