Replication Data for Learning as a Peer Assessor: Evaluating Peer-Assessment Strategies

When students engage in peer assessment or review activities, they often put emphasis on the feedback they receive from peers, but fail to appreciate how their role as a peer assessor can contribute to their learning process and improve their own work. Because of this, students and sometimes teachers undervalue the peer assessment process. This SoTL project conducts a small-scale controlled experiment with students conducting peer assessment in randomly assigned groups that either focus on giving and receiving peer feedback or assessing peers’ work only without receiving feedback on their own. In addition, it explores how different peer assessment strategies such as rubric creation, rank order assessment, and assessment without qualitative feedback effect both students’ ability to improve their work and their perception of the value of peer assessment. Consistent with theoretical expectations, the results provide limited exploratory evidence that students’ perceived value of peer assessment is lower when they do not receive feedback, but improvement in their writing is actually higher when they focus on assessing peers’ work rather than receiving feedback on their own. While feedback is a potential benefit of the peer assessment process, it may also distract focus from the potentially more valuable learning that derives from students’ self-evaluating their own work after critically assessing their peers’.

当学生参与同伴评估（peer assessment）或互评活动时，往往会将重点放在自身从同伴处获得的反馈上，却未能意识到自身作为同伴评估者的角色对自身学习过程的促进作用，以及对改进自身作业的价值。正因如此，学生乃至部分教师往往低估了同伴评估活动的整体价值。本SoTL（Scholarship of Teaching and Learning，教学学术研究）项目开展了一项小型对照实验：将学生随机分组开展同伴评估活动，其中一组兼顾给出与接收同伴反馈，另一组则仅负责评估同伴作业，自身不接收任何反馈。此外，本项目还探究了不同同伴评估策略——包括评分量规制作（rubric creation）、排序式评估（rank order assessment）以及无质性反馈（qualitative feedback）的评估——对学生改进作业的能力，以及其对同伴评估价值的认知所产生的影响。与理论预期相符的是，实验结果仅提供了有限的探索性证据：当学生未接收反馈时，其对同伴评估价值的感知程度更低；但当学生专注于评估同伴作业而非接收自身作业的反馈时，其写作作业的提升幅度反而更高。尽管反馈是同伴评估活动的一项潜在收益，但它也可能分散学生的注意力，使其忽略从批判性评估同伴作业后，对自身作业进行自我评估所带来的更具价值的学习体验。