Student-led peer marking criteria
Dr Janet Horrocks
Learning by working with peers is a key to student learning. This may involve working cooperatively or collaboratively to address a problem and in this piece we refer to groups working collaboratively on a problem. Group working can present problems for students if some group members dominate the discussions and decision making or others in the group are seen as ‘freeriders’ and take a back seat. The approach asks the group itself to develop a set of criteria for assessing peer contributions. For each criteria, students are asked to define what a contribution that would be awarded excellent would look like and then define what would lead to the award of a fail grade. The task actively engages students in thinking about how to work together as a group. Revisiting the criteria during the course of the module gives space for reflection on the way that the group is working.
Why this idea?
Working as a collaborative group is seen as essential to many programmes of study (Riebe et al., 2016) but is not without its problems for both participating students and staff supporting students. The benefits of working in a group such as developing a learning community, developing self esteem, being actively involved in the learning process and developing an understanding of how groups work are supported by the literature (such as Dochy et al., (2003), Hammer Chiriac (2014), Laal & Ghodsi (2012), and Laurillard (2012). There are however, significant challenges to working in a group: dealing with the logistics of a group, dealing with different levels of motivation from group members and dealing with the additional demands of communication and discussion that working as a group entails (Davies, 2009; Forsell et al., 2021). These challenges can be addressed from two perspectives:
Engineering a situation in which students work together effectively and develop the skills for working in groups
Making sure any assessment mechanisms fairly rewards effort and intellectual input so that assessments with elements of group work are perceived as robust.
If the first is successful, then the second will be less problematic as the group will be engaged and working together. The support and management of the group itself should thus be prominent in the mind of staff running exercises that rely on group work.
In some situations, learner groups may be already established; however, in other situations groups are formed de-novo. For a newly formed group of students, activities that develop trust and understanding are key to developing a fruitful working environment.
With this context in mind we wanted to support students’ participation in a module where working collaboratively as a group was central to the design of the module. At the start of the module we asked the group to discuss the peer marking criteria that they would like to use at the end of the module to assess the contribution of different members of the group. The use o