Making learning more inclusive with peer assessment

Peer assessment is an educational activity in which students judge the performance of their peers of equal status. It can take different forms depending on the characteristics of the learning context and its implementation. Peer assessment is often conducted in conjunction with formal self-assessment. Students reflect on their own efforts, and extend and enrich this reflection by exchanging feedback on their own and their peers‘ work.

Peer assessment can be an inclusive assessment practice through the socialization opportunities it provides for students. They interact with each other when communicating their feedback and learn about diverse ways of addressing issues and providing added perspectives.

Peer assessment can also be considered an inclusive assessment practice through the characteristic of choice. Choice can be offered in a variety of ways. For example, students can:

1. choose the criteria that they use to assess one another’s work.
2. choose the format of the feedback.
3. choose the peers to whom they will provide feedback and receive feedback from.
4. determine the criteria for a team contract and their roles in team work.
5. use different technologies, such as audio/video-recordings or online rubrics/forms, to complete the assessment.

There are multiple ways of organizing the peer feedback.

• One effective and proven way is the 360 degree feedback which was initially developed for employee evaluation in commercial organizations. It is easy to adapt for educational use.
• Internet also provides a wide array of templates for peer assessment.
• More guidance to be found: Guide to peer-assessment (Trinity College 2017)