Student Peer Assessment in Higher Education: A Meta-Analysis Comparing Peer and Teacher Marks

Abstract

Forty-eight quantitative peer assessment studies comparing peer and teacher marks were subjected to meta-analysis. Peer assessments were found to resemble more closely teacher assessments when global judgements based on well understood criteria are used rather than when marking involves assessing several individual dimensions. Similarly, peer assessments better resemble faculty assessments when academic products and processes, rather than professional practice, are being rated. Studies with high design quality appear to be associated with more valid peer assessments than those which have poor experimental design. Hypotheses concerning the greater validity of peer assessments in advanced rather than beginner courses and in science and engineering rather than in other discipline areas were not supported. In addition, multiple ratings were not found to be better than ratings by singletons. The study pointed to differences between self and peer assessments, which are explored briefly. Results are discussed and fruitful areas for further research in peer assessment are suggested.

Los proyectos de innovación como recurso formativo en el Máster del Profesorado

“…La valoración de las distintas exposiciones se ha desarrollado siguiendo la estrategia de evaluación entre iguales 2 (Falchikov y Goldfinch, 2000;Sivan, 2000) por considerarla como la manera más adecuada de evaluar las distintas propuestas.…”

Student-Graded Oral Presentations

“…It has been shown that well defined assessment criteria are helpful in getting good (or at least consistent) assessments, but no conclusive evidence have been shown with regards to the influence of age brackets, educational levels or sub-assessments of various criteria [9]. We will, partly because of this, be moderate in our discussions.…”

“…the reliability and validity of the results. While most of the papers on the quality of peer assessments focus on either reliability (mainly between peer assessments) and validity (between peer assessments and teacher assessment) as can be seen in the meta-analysis of [9], we will look at both in our assessment of our dataset. This dataset is also bigger than any of those found there, meaning that we can apply advanced statistical methods to it.…”

“…[2,3]). Both self and peer assessment can be used to assess writing [4,5,6,7,8] as well as presentations [9].…”

Towards a Scholarship of Integration: Lessons from Four Cases

“…Systematic literature reviews, for instance, are meant to "critically appraise and summarize research to inform policy and practice" 6 (p. 45). Similarly, meta-analysis "allows the evidence from different studies to be combined so that individual studies become data points in a large population of studies" 7 (p. 290) for purposes of increasing power and reducing bias introduced by individual researchers. Beyond suggestions for "speaking to practice" [8][9] , little guidance is available for those who wish to engage in scholarship of integration efforts and/or evaluate them in terms of scholarly quality.…”