Peer review of group mates
Allowing students to conduct a peer review of each member of their group helps hold individual group members accountable to one another. The aggregated results of each group member's evaluation can be used to adjust a grade for a group project. This gives students a voice in letting their instructors know who did a great job and should be recognized and who may have not contributed as much as others. You will need to decide what percentage of the project grade will be determined by peer evaluations.
How to use peer review
- Provide guidance in peer review. To ensure that students are not too lenient, too critical, or disadvantage specific groups of students (Dingel, 2014) in their peer review, some guidance should be provided by the instructor as some students may not have worked on a group project before and others may have never done a peer review. The Effective U Group Project tutorial provides guidance on both giving and receiving peer feedback.
- Ensure that peer review is done systematically. This can be done with rubric describing individual contribution standards, a checklist of desired attributes, and/or showing examples of effective and ineffective feedback. Alternatively, student group could choose their own standards at the beginning of the class and connect them to their group contract.
- Have students do an early, formative peer review of each of their group mates to provide them with practice and to alert any students who may not be performing to the group’s standards to make changes. Formative peer feedback can also improve the group’s productivity (Lane, 2023).
- For both formative and summative peer review, remind students to support their feedback or rating with specific evidence.
- Have students keep track of their individual contributions. These could be summarized in a final report. They can also be provided to the group to help them in their peer evaluations.
Individual Self-Reflection
You can also consider asking students to reflect on their experience with the group project as part of the their final project grade. Students can reflect on such things as what they learned, what they are proudest of, what challenges they encountered, or what they would do differently.
FAQs about Peer Review
My students tend to score all members of their group highly regardless of their contribution. How can I get them to reply honestly?
Inform students of the role of their peer evaluations in both fairly assessing contribution to the project and providing valuable feedback for their group mates, whether positive or negative. Then provide students with standards for the levels of evaluation. To foster more motivation and buy-in, you may even want to have students come up with some standards themselves. Ensure you provide a formative peer evaluation early in the term so that students become familiar with the standards and have the opportunity to respond to their peers’ ratings.
How much weight should student peer evaluations have on final grades?
A small amount but enough to incentivize students to take the process seriously. This can vary based on your course and the role of cooperative learning within it. Some faculty limit it to less than 10 - 20%, or no more than a half grade difference (e.g. B to B+ or B-) of the final group project grade which is only a portion of the final grade. Whatever you choose, ensure that you can justify that amount to students.
Should I assign points for completing peer evaluations?
Yes. Assigning points to activities and assignments in our courses show that they are of value to us. It also motivates students to participate.