Just like in every other industry, faculty in higher education institutions had to adjust to remote teaching almost overnight due to the COVID-19 pandemic. With the added pressure of delivering engaging lectures and revamping assessments that could be worked on remotely, teachers had to ensure that students were having a fulfilling learning experience, as they would in a classroom. Thus, more than 50% of faculty members considered leaving teaching due to the burnout caused by the pandemic.
In this article, we will cover the following topics:
While one may experience burnout at some point in their life, there are ways to recover from it and come back equipped with the right tools that help with efficiency and productivity.
Teacher burnout is a condition where, regardless of their level of experience or commitment to their profession, the person is no longer able to work or derive pleasure from their job. Downplaying emotional exhaustion and decreased motivation in teachers leads to burnout.
While burnout could look very different in everyone, it typically affects mental, physical, and emotional health which has serious implications for their personal environment. The crushing workload of delivering lectures, grading effectively, and their domestic responsibilities like no childcare and school have caused educators to go through burnout and also witness lower performances.
While students were coping with the stress of remote education during the pandemic, educators also assumed the role of counsellors and ed-tech experts suppressing their own mental health challenges as they took on these additional responsibilities. Teachers need support not only to avoid burnout but to maintain their enthusiasm for teaching.
Teacher burnout is on the rise, and it's costing schools dearly.
Experiencing teacher burnout is not just restricted to the individual, as it also impacts students, their peers, and family members. Identifying and uncovering the level of burnout before it's too late is crucial before finding ways to mitigate the effects of teacher burnout.
Increasing workload and stress can cause teachers to back out even from their regular working schedule. They may find themselves not enjoying the work and closing off to their peers. This is where educators start feeling irritated or low. Lack of time, energy, or interest to invest in self-care can seriously impact the mental and physical well-being of the individual that starts to show the first signs of burnout.
Socializing with peers and students on a daily basis can be exhausting. Turning down invitations to social activities and meetups is the beginning of Stage 2. By recognizing this stage, taking a step back from their daily responsibilities, or asking for additional help can nip the situation in the bud.
Completing the course, preparing assessments, and grading students can be exhausting. The feeling of mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion can leave you feeling drained out and disinterested in even going to work. By this stage, irritation and anxiety can lead to finding faults and issues in even the smallest things that could adversely affect relationships with peers and students.
Stress and anxiety can lead to a lack of sleep and unhealthy eating habits. By deprioritizing physical health and nutrition, educators can find themselves at risk of many serious health conditions like heart attack, diabetes, and hypertension.
Dealing with burnout necessitates diverse strategies. Educators and non-teaching staff must all work together to address this crucial issue. Leveraging peer grading technology to share the workload can help with preventing teacher burnout.
Recognizing burnout in time is critical to avoiding such situations since it jeopardizes student learning. Getting students to evaluate their peers helps enhance their knowledge of the subject and develop metacognitive abilities. Students are able to gain different perspectives and learn how to accept and give helpful and critical feedback that prepares them for life after their university education.
Kritik’s peer-grading platform uses the collective intelligence of the students to give fair and accurate ratings while streamlining workflows and shortening feedback response times. As an educator, it helps channel energies toward teaching students and becoming their mentors rather than simply grading their work.
Rubrics provide unbiased rating criteria during feedback. It allows professors and students to get quick feedback on their assignments through impartial peer review and also reduces their grade load.
With Kritik's customizable rubrics, you can either directly plug them into your assessments or make the required changes to suit your needs. This saves you time and gives your students direction when evaluating their peers which enhances the quality of feedback given. You can choose the section that best suits your essentials.
As students exchange ideas amongst themselves, the teacher’s role evolves into a mentor rather than a course facilitator, removing the burden of having to teach concepts to them. With Kritik’s dashboard, professors can facilitate online discussions that help them debate in a peaceful manner through engaging conversations. These discussions enable students with increased learning, knowledge, and understanding that might otherwise be missing.
Team-based activities help increase engagement levels in students as the onus of sharing and receiving information from peers heavily contributes toward their learning. It also sets a healthy learning atmosphere and utilizing Kritik’s team-based learning feature enables students to broaden their knowledge by applying what they've learned to build new concepts and develop a deeper understanding of their course. Team-based learning is effective when setting students up for success while also allowing you to evolve as a coach and mentor to students within their learning.
While your LMS is able to help you manage your course and assessments, integrating a peer assessment tool can help you reduce your workload. Advanced technology and ed-tech platforms are seen supporting educators in their teaching process and augmenting students' learning. As such, Kritik’s LMS can be the perfect aid that helps you track students’ records, grades, submissions, and programs. You can maintain them all under one umbrella and collect critical data and documents that students can exchange on the network.
See how Kritik compares with your LMS!
Seeking support and additional help in time can help alleviate teacher burnout before it's too late. Kritik’s peer assessment tool helps with reducing time grading time while ensuring student engagement.
Schedule a demo with our team to understand how Kritik can help you implement peer assessment in your classroom.
Peer assessment has an immense portfolio of benefits to students that can help build skills needed to be successful in the workforce. While several instructors promote the practice of peer review in their courses, a 360-degree feedback loop can ensure students are learning and effectively engaging with their classmates.
“3 in 4 employers say they have a hard time finding graduates with the soft skills their companies need.” (Wilkie D., 2019)
In this article, we are going to be exploring how peer assessment is the only scalable method for instructors to ensure meaningful interactions and for students to be ready for life after school.
Apart from learning technical, the course knowledge learned in classes that prepare students to excel in their work field, there are a few more soft skills they need to be successful.
The ability to ask questions about the information that is presented and how it is analyzed and can be used to develop new solutions is the key to building critical thinking skills[1]. A learning environment that gives students enough opportunities to probe, receive feedback, and find alternatives can enhance their level of thinking and the quality of work they produce.
“The University of British Columbia[2] outlines peer-to-peer assessment as a tool that can develop several real-world skills where students can enhance their engagement in critical review of their future colleagues.”
It is inevitable that students will work in teams and collaborate with their colleagues on projects in the workforce. When students are exposed to collaborative learning environments in college/universities, it teaches them how to deal with different kinds of people. Address various issues and find mutual solutions that help the team. A major part of this process is learning how to give meaningful feedback.
“[Before Kritik], the students never thought they could evaluate someone because they’re so used to me evaluating them. I liked the fact that [Kritik] had a strong critical thinking component, and the students were able to grade their peers.” - Professor Francine Guice
It is necessary for students to be agile and adaptable to change so they can think, act, and react quickly in time-sensitive situations. These are some soft skills that freshers who join the workforce need to survive in the real world. Therefore, they are often teamed with people who already possess these skills rather than be left alone to work.
Learning the ropes to effective communication (oral and written) comes with much practice. Even if the students feel they’ve used clear words to express their concerns, there is no guarantee that the information will be interpreted correctly. Having multiple opportunities to work with peers ensures a better understanding of each others’ strengths, the right style and the mode of communication.
“People who communicate effectively know how to interact with others flexibly, skillfully, and responsibly, but without sacrificing their own needs and integrity.”- Dr. Ankita Gautam[3]
Receiving timely feedback can enable students to course correct before it’s too late. Being receptive to feedback and using it as an opportunity to produce better quality work shows a willingness to learn, which is what most employers look for when hiring fresh talent.
While giving helpful and constructive feedback can take a few iterations, providing structured rubrics can guide students in the right direction. Let us see how peer assessment can hone this skill among students.
The ultimate objective of any learning process is to apply your knowledge in the real world. However, this becomes challenging when students do not actively participate in class activities and discussions. Here is where peer assessments help as the process helps -
In a study that compared student perceptions of giving feedback and receiving feedback, it was found that students could improve their work by simply providing feedback to their peers before even receiving their own[4]. With Kritik, this is made easy in three steps: Create, Evaluate, and Feedback, wherein students are required to give constructive feedback.
When giving feedback to their peers, students are required to analyze the assignments to give pointers on how they can be made better and also commend their achievements. While this exposes the student to a different way of looking at the same problem, it also forces the student to think about their own approach.
As students get to see the problem in different capacities as a student and as an evaluator, this helps with reinforcing the concepts learned in their minds. Most instructors using Kritik can turn around feedback within a week or before the next lecture, which helps them be better prepared to understand the forthcoming topics.
When instructors use peer assessments in their courses, they are giving their cohorts another opportunity to learn and engage with each other. Instructors using Kritik in their courses say that their students try harder when they know that their peers are going to be assessing the quality of their work.
Peer assessment on Kritik enables an environment that nurtures the act of honesty through how accurately and fairly a student grades their peer's work compared to the overall mark the creation receives. Building these fundamental skills will enhance their ability to build trustworthy connections within their personal and professional relationships.
Schedule a demo with Kritik today to build transferable skills that equip students for their careers.
Peer assessment is widely recognized as an effective pedagogical approach to increase students' understanding of course material and collaboration in the classroom. However, despite these well documented benefits there are still obstacles to peer assessment that must be addressed, a large one being the issue of motivating and engaging inactive students.
With inactive students comes the threat of poor feedback quality, as students don't put enough time or effort into the feedback they give. Unfortunately, this reduces the benefits of peer assessment to the students that do put in a good effort. To properly address and combat this issue, we must first understand why it is that students become disengaged and what we can do to ensure their participation.
When considering how to best motivate students, an important aspect to remember is that every stage of their learning needs to count towards something. There are a few key aspects to learning in a typical peer assessment, as students are required to: create, evaluate, analyze, and finally apply with the end result being an improved understanding. Studies indicate that by providing students with incentives to participate in every stage, such as making them all count towards their grade, their willingness to actively participate improves dramatically (Ashenafi, 2017). Every student has different learning styles and excels in different areas, so by providing motivation to participate in all levels of the peer assessment process, we allow these students the opportunity to excel in their own right.
“We know that every student engages and learns differently so while they may be quiet in class, they might provide wonderful feedback to their peers through the peer assessment process.” - Dr. Michael Jones, See more here.
It is important to ensure that all aspects of the peer assessment process, including the creation, evaluation, and feedback stages, all count towards grading. When this occurs, students become more motivated to participate instead of only focusing on their own submission and the grades it receives. By adding a grading weight that impacts final marks at each stage of the process, students are also more inclined to give thoughtful evaluations and feedback to their peers. Kritik embraces this unique approach to peer assessment, which also ensures that students receive actionable feedback on how they can improve their evaluation skills. See a breakdown of the customizable grading scheme of a typical Kritik assignment below:
Peer assessment at its core is designed with the goal of enhancing student learning by enabling students to become a thoughtful evaluator. Having to think critically and analyze their peers' work enables students to develop a deeper understanding of course materials than they would if they were just simply submitting an assignment to an instructor. This teaches students to become expert analyzers, and helps them learn to read through a lens that is constantly seeking out ways to improve.
“[Kritik] empowered them to speak up, engage and participate more. They felt more comfortable actually expressing their opinions and they felt like what they had to say and the way they perceived things were correct.” - Dr. Daphne Hart, See more here.
Students become motivated to improve their own work as they review their peers, because they see what other individuals in the same learning environment did well and what they can improve on. After reviewing various pieces of work done by their peers and receiving feedback from a diverse audience on their own work, students are able to efficiently improve and refine their skills. This feedback loop truly increases motivation among students, as they now start to see themselves as active participants in the assessment process rather than just a passive recipient of it.
“Students should be part of the educational process and not consumers of it. Students feel valued when they feel like they’re part of the learning space where everyone is learning from each other.” - Dr. Jonathan Wisco, See more here.
It is valuable to immerse students in this type of environment, where like minded individuals can learn new skills from their peers and then apply and experiment with the skills they learn. This facilitates a very positive outlook to the learning process, as many students are longing to see school become more applicable to their everyday lives. As is mentioned in this article, providing a curriculum that is both relevant and reflective ensures maximum retention and participation among students.
Offering student’s the ability to track their progress and monitor how close they are to achieving specific class or personal goals is another impactful aspect to a student’s motivation and engagement. This is certainly a challenge in peer assessment because the immediate impact of a student's contributions is not necessarily visible right away. This can be detrimental to students who are hyper aware of tracking their progress and like to see the rewards for their hard work in all aspects of an assignment. With Kritik, students' evaluations and feedback are rewarded not only with marks, but also with increased grading power which is something students can strive to increase.
“[Before Kritik], the students never thought that they could evaluate someone because they’re so used to me evaluating them. I liked the fact that [Kritik] had a strong critical thinking component and the students were able to grade their peers.” - Francine Guice, See more here.
At Kritik, students' grading power is constantly adapting to reflect their efforts and abilities. Depending on the quality of their evaluations, students grading power will fluctuate throughout the semester as illustrated in the image below:
This works to serve two purposes,
In a typical peer assessment setting, a student's full potential is not measured through the strength or development of evaluations, but with Kritik this is an important part of the process. Students evaluations are graded on how motivational and critical they are, and students use this feedback to become a better evaluator.
Above all else, the most important aspect in ensuring your students remain engaged throughout the course of a semester, is consistency. Students appreciate getting into a routine where they know what is expected of them and are not constantly being surprised with new methods of teaching and changing expectations. We believe that students truly begin to thrive only once they are comfortable inside the classroom, which is why at Kritik, consistency is paramount to everything that we do. Things like consistent anonymity, a detailed rubric, and clearly defined objectives on every assignment truly equip students with the tools necessary to be successful.
“Kritik has this level of anonymity so they don’t know who they’re evaluating which we like because it removes that assessment bias and it makes them more comfortable.” - Dr. Michael Jones See more here.
This holistic approach focuses less on only the original submission, and more on the process of constant refinement and improvement which keeps students active from start to finish. Ensuring that all aspects of the peer assessment count towards the students grade will keep them motivated to do well and get good marks in the course. The ability to track your progress and monitor your improvement throughout the semester, coupled with a consistent format that students know they can trust, will yield the best results in terms of engaging and motivating students who tend to be inactive.
When people think of peer-assessments, they typically associate it with written work that revolves around discussion posts, reflections, and various types of reports. However, peer assessment has proven to be incredibly versatile and can be utilized in a number of applied courses and activities. For example, courses such as nursing, music, physical therapy, and labs typically require an applied component of study, sometimes referred to as practicums.
Unfortunately due to COVID, a lot of these courses can no longer run these invaluable practicums, resulting in students being assigned written work as an alternative. To combat this, Kritik allows students to upload a variety of different attachments, including videos of presentations, script readings, clinical roleplays, musical performances, and more. We know how important these practicums are for preparing students to enter the workforce, which is why we strive to ensure they have the opportunity to participate in them regardless of whether class is in-person or online.
By submitting videoed assignments on Kritik, students are given the unique opportunity for both self-assessment and peer assessment. In one study, students in a practical diagnosis course uploaded videos of themselves performing a physical examination. Students reported that by recording themselves, they were able to self-assess their practicum before receiving peer feedback, which made them more aware of their strengths and weaknesses in verbal and nonverbal communication (Sadowski et 2020).
Students are then able to evaluate their peers' work, which helps them improve their critical thinking and analytical skills. Once feedback is given, students can self-assess their performance one last time with the goal of reflecting on the input from their peers. This holistic approach to evaluating videos “engages and forces critical thinking in both video creators as well as video assessors” (Burrows & Borowczak, 2016).
“By allowing students to give and receive peer feedback, I’m giving them extensions on their learning too.” - Prof. Whitney Sutherland see more here..
Kritik provides students with a collection of materials and feedback that they can access whenever they need to, even after the course is finished. Whether students want to review content for upcoming tests, co-op interviews, or post-graduation employment, they will always have access to all their work and feedback. In addition to this, students also maintain access to their peers' work, which allows them to compare it to their own and continue analyzing it even after the assignment is completed. This encourages students to continue identifying areas of improvement and things done well that they can implement in their own future work.
By videoing practical assessments for peer evaluation, students can analyze their peers' performance more accurately. Students can rewatch, rewind, and pause their peer's videos as much as they need, enabling them to provide the best possible feedback and preventing them from missing anything. In addition, Kritik ensures that student grading is fair and accurate with our calibration feature.
This unique feature allows students to have varying levels of grading power based on how close they grade to their professor's expectations. By giving students a measure of their evaluation skills and gamifying it, it encourages them to put more effort into their reviews which facilitates a greater understanding of the material.
“Through the gamified system, the students themselves want to become better reviewers; they can see their progress in real-time via the stars and badges system Kritik uses to encourage engagement." - Prof. Kelly Morse
Courses in the medical profession; including nursing, physical therapy, and surgery, often contain components of practical assessment. Things such as demonstrating proper bedside manners and assessing the range of motion in a patient's joints are just two possible examples of many. To illustrate the benefits of recording these activities for peer assessment, a study was done with nursing students roleplaying a therapeutic consultation. The nursing students found the feedback they received to be helpful and the study concluded that peer assessment helped enhance communication skills (Chin-Yuan, 2016).
Want to learn more? Professor Denise Mendenhall from the University of Missouri also uses Kritik in her nursing courses to effectively assess her students' communication skills.
It’s important to receive feedback on these types of performances, especially when the works are composed by the students themselves. When it comes to original compositions, there is not a definitive set of rules to follow, unlike demonstrating lab safety as in our earlier examples. This makes receiving peer feedback exponentially more beneficial, as it can be difficult to self-assess the strong points and areas for improvement in your own work.
Verbal assessments can include anything from presentations, marketing pitches, and speaking in a foreign/second language. In particular, when it comes to foreign languages, findings have shown that formative peer assessment can effectively improve a student's language proficiency (Zheng et al., 2021). By having students video themselves in a second language, they can self-assess and take the time to figure out what parts were well-spoken and what parts were not. Students then receive feedback from their peers which helps them catch any mistakes they may have originally overlooked. In addition, by analyzing their peers, students gain an even better understanding of the language than they would in a typical class environment.
Practical assessments are essential to a large range of courses and help students prepare for the workforce. Videoing these practicums for peer assessment can help enhance students' practical skills as well as reduce their anxiety when performing them in person (Sadowski et 2020). To ensure that students get the most out of their practicums and are receiving specific and accurate feedback, educators should consider using online peer assessment. Connect with us here to learn more about how you can enhance your LMS with Kritik!
It seems like an oxymoron. Doesn’t grading time directly improve student learning? Well yes, and it depends.
Here’s a comment posted by a university professor on a higher education social media page:
“A mix of exhaustion and exasperation: I have graded English 101 essays forever this semester...once a week with about 80 students total. Any ideas on how to grade more effectively without burnout.”
The sentiment shared in this comment is one many professors relate to. When grading feels unsustainable or ineffective, it likely is. To solve these issues, we need to consider grading and assessment differently. How can we involve students in the process, so they receive the benefits of the engagement and critical thinking involved in evaluating work and the instructor has time and space to mentor and coach students? Below, we explore common issues related to traditional assessment and grading methods and how peer learning can improve the teaching and learning experience for students and professor alike.
Kritik professors choose to use the Kritik platform for various reasons: to increase student interaction, improve student engagement, and incorporate performance-based learning. Out of all these benefits, the commonality is that each professor is seeking a more effective and efficient way to deliver feedback and progress student learning. That is the key aspect of the proposition of Kritik.
Not every professor, or teaching and learning case is the same, but there are a few common issues that emerge with traditional forms of assessment and grading.
The quantity and quality of the feedback are co-related. If a professor sits down to mark 100 papers, the quality of feedback will be stronger on the ones conducted at the start where thinking is fresh, and energy levels are consistent, compared to the ones at the end of the pile.
Of course, spreading out the grading load over multiple days can help mitigate this, but this also results in students not receiving timely feedback to apply their learning and improve on the next activities. We surveyed Kritik professors across a range of disciplines and asked them, before using Kritik, how long it took on average to deliver feedback to students. On average, without Kritik, professors returned feedback after 7-10 days.
Peer learning with Kritik eliminates this delay, meaning that once students complete the evaluation stage, providing feedback to their peers, they immediately receive a minimum of 3 points of feedback each activity to improve their understanding, approach, and learning moving forward. This is because, for each activity in Kritik, professors assign 3 or more evaluators. While students provide feedback to one another, the professor observes and monitors the quality of work and provides additional feedback to correct, enhance or extend the learning.
Beyond the timeliness of feedback with peer learning, the structure helps ensure the quality is maintained and in some cases leads to better feedback than the professor could provide on their own. In fact, Dr. Amelia Sofjan from the University of Houston reflected on this point as a guest speaker at a recent workshop.
“[Kritik] made me reflect on my own feedback and I realized that I have a lot to learn from the way students give feedback. If I had to rate my own feedback based on the critical and motivational scale Kritik uses, I would score really high on the critical scale but probably not so high on the motivational scale, so I was learning from the students that in order for somebody to really take your feedback seriously, it can’t just be critical, but it has to be given in such as way that it motivates them and that’s pretty amazing.” - Amelia Sofjan, Department of Pharmacy, University of Houston
Here’s a situation: You are a professor teaching an economics class with over 1000 students. You are deciding what activities to incorporate into your course and can’t ignore the fact that for every activity you and or your TA’s will have to provide feedback on 1000 pieces of work. How does this impact the activities you select? Is this decision based primarily on what’s best for student learning or primarily based on the resources available and the traditional approach to assessment?
Whether you teach 100 students or 1000, this is a reality for course creation. If the feedback and evaluations are coming solely from professors and TAs, they need to be able to handle the amount of work being submitted to them.
In the case of Dr. Alex Gainer, professor of Economics at the University of Alberta, this was very much the case with his intro level course of 1700 students. Dr. Gainer turned to Kritik, and with their system of peer learning, he was able to not only increase the number of personalized feedback students received, but he was able to incorporate team-based learning with peer learning.
In one semester, Dr. Gainer used Kritik to manage 435 groups of students, with 3 or 4 students per group across 5 activities. For each activity, each student evaluated 5 of their peers’ work. This means that over the course of one semester, not including the feedback directly from Dr. Gainer, Kritik provided the means to facilitate over 42,000 points of peer feedback.
All of a sudden, Dr. Gainer was not limited based on how many students he taught in a given semester. He could be more innovative and creative with his teaching practice and even provide the opportunity for his students to experience group work within a large class size.
“I was quite surprised at how vigilant my students were in evaluating each other, and how serious they are towards Kritik. Students seem to enjoy the personalized feedback that they receive, and they are getting better and better at using Kritik as the term progresses.” Dr. Alex Gainer, Department of Economics, University of Alberta
The professor is the topic expert. There’s no replacing their impact on student learning, however, it’s important to recognize the value of the inputs of the students themselves. They may not be the experts yet, but they are capable of thinking critically about a topic, following the guidance of a rubric and sharing their unique perspectives and insights to improve their peers’ work.
Diverse perspectives are an important component of student learning that develops critical thinking and soft skills. The process of peer learning, while teaching students the value of multiple points of feedback, also empowers the professor to have the time to coach and mentor students on a more individualized level.
With peer learning, 100% of feedback doesn’t flow to and from the professor. Dr. Charles Reigeluth, author and educational researcher whose work has paved the way forward for high-quality personalized competency-based learning (PCBL) outlines how the instructor as guide fulfills many roles, including mentor, instructional designer, facilitator and learner.
With Kritik, professors can focus their time and energy not on rushing to grade every single paper in time for the next activity to be launched, but on the areas that have the highest impact on student learning.
For example, Dr. Kelly Morse, English professor out of Old Dominion University, identifies gaps in knowledge and understanding of her students by reading the creations and evaluations and by observing the insights and metrics provided by the Kritik platform. One solution that has worked well for Dr. Morse is to model proper evaluations for her students in class as well as spotlight strong creations and evaluations directly in Kritik.
“As some students become stronger graders, those students get consistently redistributed throughout each activity. Not only do they see through the gamified system that they’re becoming better reviewers, everyone is benefiting from the strong reviewers and everyone is helping the weaker reviewers who are learning.” - Kelly Morse, Department of English, Old Dominion University
For Professor Lyzzie Golliher from Old Dominion University, she found it helpful to use Kritik as a way to observe her students’ “conversations with one another and while you can do it to some extent in the classroom by breaking students off into group discussions, seeing their actual feedback in Kritik has allowed me to adapt a lot of my lesson plans...so it’s been really helpful.”
Additionally, Professor Golliher recognized the value of including students in the feedback process: “It’s really positive because...we know that when [students] start to interact you know they’re not just learning from you as a professor, the possibilities increase and they’re able to get a lot more benefit.” - Lyzzie Golliher, Department of English, Old Dominion University
For professors looking for a more effective and efficient way to achieve student success and guide student learning there are solutions in peer learning.
Connect with us at Kritik to learn more about how you can incorporate peer learning and learn from the diverse experiences of previous Kritik professors.
Two years, 100,000 students and professors and over one million peer evaluations with Kritik.
More important than the milestone is the learning that has happened along the way. Seeing how Kritik professors have adopted peer learning, how they have introduced it to their students, how they have innovated their teaching practices and how students have benefitted from a more engaging and interactive learning environment where they are encouraged through every activity to think critically.
15% of the evaluations were from group activities and 85% of the activities were from individual activities.
Professors can assign from 3 to 20 evaluators per activity in Kritik, however, the average number of evaluators per activity is 4. This aligns with findings from our student survey, where students expressed 3 to 4 evaluations as the optimal number. It’s always important to balance the amount of work required for evaluations and ensure students have exposure to multiple perspectives through the peer assessment process.
For rubric creation, it’s best to keep them simple and focused on the learning objectives. Including 4-6 criteria per rubric is advised to ensure students remain clear on what it is they need to focus on in any given activity. This aligns with the average number of rubric criteria applied by Kritik professors over the previous two years. The average number of criteria per rubric is 5.
In Kritik, the average grading score increase per student per semester is 255%. Now, what does this mean? The grading score is an indication of students’ evaluative abilities and critical thinking. In order to be scored highly, students must demonstrate consistently that they are able to understand the learning objectives and draw connections between their peers’ work and the rubric criteria. They also need to be able to deliver meaningful feedback that is both critical and motivational. The grading score adjusts automatically throughout the semester to provide a measurement of progress to the professor and the students.
In addition to these metrics, the Kritik platform has evolved adding new features like multi-topic activities, a feedback stage with group-based activities, and expanding our rubric templates to make the process easier and more efficient for professors. The 244 updates that have taken place are a direct result of our strong Kritik educator community who we work closely to advance and innovate our platform as they advance and innovate their teaching practices.
Common themes have emerged through 1:1 conversations, our Faculty-led workshops, feature requests and our live chat support over this period.
When asked what factor led to the overall success of peer learning with Kritik, time and time again professors would credit the time and energy spent into creating a positive learning culture.
“So far the students have not disputed anything and I think part of that is because I set up a culture at the beginning of the assignment and made it clear that it’s not busywork, it really is about higher orders of learning and trying to understand your value in that space.” - Dr. Jonathan Wisco, School of Medicine, Boston University
“I try and instill a culture where I’m not out there to get any students through my exams, in fact, I’m very open about if I write a question that negatively impacted my students, I want feedback on why that was and I’m going throw that question out because that’s not fair.” - Dr. Jonathan Wisco, School of Medicine, Boston University
“When it’s a group project, I tell my students that the overall goal is to make sure that your group fully understands what they’re talking about so when you’re presenting this potentially to a client, everyone’s on board and everyone knows what they are talking about.” - Dr. Karen Freberg, Strategic Communications, University of Louisville
“I knew I wanted the students to leave the class with a strong understanding of critical thinking, creative thinking, the general research process and the ability to receive and apply both constructive and motivational feedback to their peers.” - Dr. RayeCarol Cavendar, Human Environmental Sciences, University of Kentucky
“Seeing what others are doing and my spin on it in class was always positive, and the purpose was to get the students to think critically and get them to be at the point where they are comfortable about giving feedback in a useful and effective way and also receiving feedback, so it was always positive...definitely the self-reflection helps...it’s sort of is built into the process...it gave them the confidence to know that their opinions or research and analysis are actually good.” - Dr. Daphne Hart, Business, University of Illinois at Chicago
Students develop their evaluative skills, their critical thinking and understanding of course content through a consistent process of peer learning. We recommend any new professor using peer learning incorporates a minimum of 5 activities. This could mean 5 activity variations, a weekly or biweekly reflection, or scaffolding a larger assignment like a research project into multiple steps, or stages.
The time required to set up each activity is minimal and many professors choose to use a template and consistent rubric they carry throughout the semester. This means students know what to expect and can refine their process and improve over time.
This consistency gives students the opportunity to iterate and improve their peer evaluations by observing and critiquing the evaluations that their peers anonymously submit for their work.
Making Kritik a consistent part of the assessment process is important on the professor’s end. In terms of the Kritik platform, each activity, whether it be individual or group-based, is set up in a similar way with a stated objective, instructions, and rubric with a clear schedule for students to know when they need to complete each stage: creation, evaluation and feedback stage.
Strong evaluation and critical thinkings might not come over night, but on average, students’ grading powers improve by 255% over the course of the semester. Grading powers refer to how effectively students evaluate their peers. The grading power, a score out of 6, adjusts automatically after each activity. Grading power directly impacts the weights of the evaluations, meaning students with a higher grading power establish that they deliver strong and accurate feedback and have higher weighted evaluations than students with lower grading powers.
In order to teach students how to think critically, we must give them the space to do so.
This means that students have the room to consider a topic, subject or question in different ways. To come to their own conclusions and present their findings and research in a way that is uniquely theirs.
Through performance-based assessment, Kritik helps professors construct and implement activities that engage students on a deeper level and experience the views and perspectives of their peers.
As Shavelson et. al (2019) shares, “performance tasks are high-fidelity simulations of actual real-world decision or interpretation-situations found daily.” These real-world decisions, irrespective of the activity type - although this further enhances this experience - are built into the peer learning process with Kritik. Sharing and receiving personalized feedback requires a high degree of communication and soft skills to capture meaning from others’ comments, and ensure students can improve the thinking of their peers by delivering feedback that is motivational and critical.
As Jonathan Wisco shared in a recent workshop, a real-world activity he implemented required, “teams of students to solve the impacts on the community and in this case it was a business proposal for increasing training and the efficacy of those training which is a huge problem in the business world.”
Karen Freberg shares how her students complete strategic communications assignments that simulate the types of experiences they will have in the real world: “I tell them [my students] that in the industry you’re going to have to do research and evaluate whether or not this campaign was successful and then decide what to do next...so I try and make it as applicable to real-world as possible.”
Kelly Morse shares that incorporating peer review in her English class simulated the type of real-world environment and critical thinking her students would face after graduation and her students realized “over time that this is a skill that [they] actually really need to learn for the workplace, and they [realized] their peers actually had really good ideas and that they don’t just need to look at the teacher.”
While each case is unique, Kritik professors have found success in empowering students through peer evaluation while applying real-world learning and critical thinking with the structure and guidance that ensures students, no matter their stage of learning, receive the support they need to achieve the learning goals.
Reflection is an important part of the critical thinking process. As Ennis (1996) states, critical “thinking is also reflective and logical thinking”. Reflection requires the space and time to consider what has been done and what could be improved moving forward. The peer evaluation process in Kritik embeds this into every activity as students evaluate their peers’ work, evaluate the feedback received front their peers and evaluate their own work before submission.
Lastly, “due to the nature of critical thinking, critical thinking requires reflection and sociability” (Choy and Oo, 2012). Peer to peer interactions with Kritik, whether in online or in-person learning environments, play a critical role in the teaching and learning process. The act of being exposed to peers’ work, and sharing and receiving feedback means students have to navigate a new dynamic - that is working with their peers anonymously compared to only their teacher.
“I felt that [Kritik] empowered my students to actually speak up, engage and actually participate more...my sense was that they felt more comfortable actually expressing their opinions and it gave them the sense that they should express their opinions and ask questions more” - Dr. Daphne Hart, Business, the University of Illinois at Chicago
Guiding students towards academic success is directly related to the learning environment we build around them. The culture, the consistent and purposeful structure of rubrics, learning objectives and timelines, and the space and time embedded into each activity to think critically all work together to support students.
Connect with us to see how you can leverage peer learning in your own courses and learn from other Kritik professors and over 1 million peer evaluations.
Peer evaluation is a powerful tool for fostering collaboration, critical thinking, and inspiring growth within a classroom setting. A strong rubric is often the backbone of effective peer assessment as it provides a clear framework for assessing and providing feedback on peers’ work. Rubrics ensure objectivity, consistency, and fairness in the evaluation process.
However, creating an effective rubric may be a challenging task for many instructors. Let us look into some of the key elements of a perfect peer grading rubric. This shall help you create a robust framework to guide your students in providing effective feedback.
In this article, we will be covering:
A rubric defines a set of criteria that an assessor can use to evaluate work. Rubrics are not only impactful grading tools for instructors but also formative learning tools for students, as they provide a more objective method of grading,allow students to understand course expectations and apply their knowledge to their work accordingly (Arter & McTighe, 2001).
A 2010 literature review about the effectiveness of rubrics concludes that rubrics can enhance student learning by helping students understand course expectations and encourage them to think critically about their work (Reddy & Andrade, 2010). Instructors can create rubrics to provide students with well-defined criteria against which they can effectively assess peers’ work. A rubric can guide students to evaluate their peers’ work and provide specific feedback.
A robust peer evaluation grading rubric designed by the instructor can go a long way in ensuring that students evaluate peers’ work as the instructor would have done. Here are four key considerations while designing a peer grading rubric.
By considering the learning objective of an assignment, the criteria can be broken down into specific skills or competencies that can be evaluated. This helps create a shared understanding of assignment expectations among students, thereby enhancing transparency in peer assessment.
Example: In a creative writing assignment, the criteria could include vocabulary, language skills, character development, and plot progression.
The rating scale used in a peer assessment rubric should be neither too simplistic nor too complicated. A numerical rating scale, for example, is an easy and straightforward rating scale that provides a range within which peers can provide feedback.
Example: Prof. Jane Barnette uses ungrading practices in her Theatre and Dance course. See how she designs her rubrics.
Outline what each rating on the scale means in terms of performance. By consulting the rubric, students should get a clear idea of what grades constitute excellent, satisfactory, and poor performance. This helps them to evaluate their peers’ work fairly.
Example: Check out Prof. Art Carden’s 6X7 rubric for essay assignments with a detailed description for each level.
A peer grading rubric should clearly outline the process of assessment, evaluation criteria, deadlines, do’s and don’ts, while providing feedback and any additional information, such as the significance of peer assessment. These guidelines help foster a sense of responsibility among peers and make the evaluation process more structured and effective.
Example: Check out how Prof. RayeCarol Cavender guides her students through the evaluation process.
Peer evaluation rubrics can be of several types, as each assignment has its own goals and requirements and is designed to test different skill sets. Let us look at a few peer grading rubric examples designed for effective assessment of different assignment types.
An essay is a common assessment method across courses in higher learning institutions. A peer grading rubric for essays will typically focus on conciseness, clarity, completeness, comprehension of ideas, as well as the proper use of grammar and syntax. The weightage provided to each of these criteria would differ for different courses. Here is an example:
Peer evaluation has been proven to improve the quality of engagement in student presentations (Girard, T., et al. 2011). Rubrics for presentation should be determined differently for individual and group presentations. However, content, clarity, delivery, and audience engagement remain some of the most important criteria for a peer assessment presentation rubric. Here is an example of a peer grading rubric for presentations:
With Kritik, it is also possible to design peer evaluation rubrics for lab reports. Although lab report rubrics have a different focus than other assignments, these rubrics ideally focus on the comprehensive presentation of steps followed during an experiment, correct scientific explanations and measurements, and the completeness of the report. Here is an example:
Many have found that LMS platforms render discussion ineffective since students do not engage with others or read each other’s posts. However, it is possible to direct effective discussion in the classroom with the help of rubrics. In Kritik, rubrics can be customized to insert discussion prompts for any kind of assignment, which lets students know exactly what questions to ask and assess, thereby enhancing engagement and facilitating stimulating class discussions. Here is an example:
Creating peer grading rubrics for group projects can be tricky as it is essential for peers to evaluate not only other groups’ work but also the contributions of their group members. Anonymous peer review works best in group settings. These rubrics focus on accuracy, ability to communicate, team role fulfillment, and cooperation with others. Here is an example of a peer grading rubric for team-based settings:
Kritik has a large repository of rubrics that instructors can plug into their assignment to guide students to do peer evaluations effectively. Instructors can also upload their rubrics or make changes to existing templates to suit their course needs.
Instructors using Kritik have seen students getting better at using rubrics with every successive assignment as they always have access to it on the screen during the Create (Submission) stage or at the Evaluate (anonymous peer evaluations) stage.
If you’d like to check out more peer grading rubrics and activities, you may download the following case studies:
On average, students' grading power increases by 255% over the course of a semester in Kritik. Grading powers, a score out of 6, refer to how effectively students evaluate their peers and the scores are adjusted by the Kritik platform automatically after each activity. This means that students on average are becoming better evaluators by learning how to identify and communicate critical and motivational feedback to their peers over time.
Peer assessment benefits student learning through increased student engagement, improved motivations to learn, and an increased efficiency in grading workflow. However, many instructors refrain from implementing peer assessment due to a lack of understanding on how to manage it — particularly with larger class sizes — and how to ensure reliability and validity of the process (Falkichov & Goldfinch, 2000). Ultimately, this deprives students of the benefits of peer assessment— but there is a way forward.
Dr. Karen Freberg, Professor of Marketing and Communications at the University of Louisville and West Virginia University, notes that she has seen a positive change in her classroom’s responsiveness and attitude towards her courses because her students felt more confident with sharing ideas and demonstrating class concepts.
“I’ve seen a huge difference in writing and strategic thinking and concepts based on utilizing Kritik in my classes.”
In 2000, a meta-analysis of 52 studies examined the comparability of peer evaluations to instructor evaluations. The research measured a mean correlation of 0.69, suggesting definite evidence of agreement between peer and instructor grading (Falchikov & Goldfinch, 2000). The levels of education and subjects across these studies did not affect the comparability of peer evaluations and instructor evaluations overall (Falchikov & Goldfinch, 2000). It should be noted that well-designed studies showed more positive results about the relationship between peer and teacher grading, and clear instructions and grading criteria also influenced the quality of peer evaluations.
More recently, a 2020 meta-analysis found that peer assessment enhanced student learning in ways that professor assessment could not. With a high comparability between peer grading and instructor grading, peer assessment presented a more impactful and positive effect on student academic performance because students felt more motivated to learn and apply their knowledge when assessing their peers’ work (Double et al., 2020).
The peer assessment process in Kritik follows three stages: the Create Stage, Evaluate Stage, and Feedback Stage. To better illustrate the Kritik grading system, let’s introduce Jessica, a first year English student. In Kritik, Jessica will take part in a three-stage peer assessment process.
Through this process, she will receive three grades that make up the overall activity score and multiple points of feedback from her peers.
Jessica’s Creation score is determined by how her peers evaluate her work; her Evaluation score is determined by the quality of her own evaluations; and her Feedback score is determined by the number of evaluations she provides feedback on.
If an instructor manually grades the Creation (e.g. resolving a grade dispute, grading a late submission, etc.), the evaluator’s grading score is compared to the instructor’s grade instead of their peers.
Kritik uses a Grading Score and Grading Power to ensure accountability and meaning to the peer assessment process while providing students and professors with a measurable outcome along the way. To differentiate the two:
At the beginning of the course, the professor releases calibration activity to set the grading score and to introduce the students to peer assessment process. Multiple calibration activities can be set throughout the term to adjust students’ grading power overtime.
For example, Jessica might score very similarly to her professor, as calculated in the first calibration activity scheduled at the beginning of the term. Before her course started, she had a default grading power of Beginner, but after her calibration activity, she marked very closely to her professor, so she leveled up to Beginner 2. This means that she will have more impact on her peers’ Creation scores when she evaluates them compared to students who are still at Beginner level.
A good analogy for grading power is comparing weighted assignments. If Essay A is worth 50% of your overall mark and Essay B is only worth 30%, then Essay A will have more impact on your overall mark. Thus, if Student A has a higher grading power (50%) and Student B has a lower grading power (30%), then how Student A grades you will impact your evaluation score more than Student B.
Even after the calibration activity, Kritik uses AI to conduct micro-calibrations after every activity. Students’ grading power changes based on how closely they assess one another. Moreover, when instructors manually regrade or adjust students’ scores, the students’ grading power will change accordingly.
With a better understanding of the scoring system in Kritik and how grading power works, let’s get into why these things matter… and how this design inherently protects the validity and accuracy of peer grading.
As mentioned before, Kritik has calibration activities that instructors can set up throughout the term. Calibration activities are a unique component of Kritik peer assessment activities that guarantee meaningful and valid comparability between peer grading and instructor grading. The Kritik AI compares student evaluations to the baseline created by the professor, which:
The calibration feature ultimately increases efficiencies in grading time and workflow as multiple students evaluate one another’s work working towards the model and expectations set by the professor. Setting a calibration activity will also discourage students from colluding to grade one another highly, as they will understand that their grading power is calibrated based on their professor's evaluations.
Kritik assigns a default of 5 evaluations per student, and distributes evaluations evenly across all students. Having multiple assessments introduces dynamic feedback, and the weighted average of these evaluations ensures that they are still being marked closely to what the instructor would mark them individually.
Worried about students evaluating others first, seeing their peers’ work, and then submitting their assignment after? Don’t worry: students can only evaluate their peers after the Create stage, meaning they are guided through the process in a controlled manner, so that they can properly reflect and take the time to provide meaningful evaluations to their peers.
Professor Elliot Currie from the University of Guelph notes how Kritik has improved his students’ quality of work and feedback with multiple evaluations:
“The students put a fair amount of time and effort into their assessments. They did want to receive customized feedback, so they felt the need to put effort into their assessments. The Evaluation score tracks how the students perform in their assessment, and they got better at providing feedback throughout the term. Kritik's calibration and grade dispute features allow me to ensure students are on the right track.”
Assignments are double blind meaning students will not see who they are evaluating, nor will they know who evaluated them. Double blind peer assessment activities also lead to an improved feedback quality and a positive student experience as students feel less pressure to grade or complete their work anonymously. As Professor Michael Jones, Kritik user and professor of Communications at Sheridan College notes:
“Kritik has this level of anonymity so they don’t know who they’re evaluating which we like because it removes that assessment bias and it makes them more comfortable.”
Peer assessment activities require students to evaluate their peers using criteria offered by instructors. Creating rubrics with clear criteria will allow students to understand course expectations and demonstrate their knowledge by creating and assessing work. Moreover, clear criteria guides assessors to make decisions on what classifies good work and not, and be used consistently across the class.
Moreover, the written evaluation portion of the Evaluate stage allows for specific feedback with strengths and weaknesses. The Feedback stage allows for feedback on peers’ evaluations for more strengths and weaknesses, introducing an honest, dynamic dialogue between students to better understand the course.
Check out our community of practice article on crafting detailed rubrics for higher education.
The goal of Kritik is to empower students to take control of their learning . Professor Heidi Engelhardt from the University of Waterloo talks about how the integrated peer assessment in Kritik improved her students’ academic performances overall and increased her grading efficiency.
“[Students are] coming from a culture of grade inflation: ‘justify why I did not get 100’ tends to be what the mindset is. So, sure, you provide a rubric, but they are expecting 100. So I made sure they knew that, at least to the criteria, it wasn’t just adequate that got you four stars out of four. It was knocking that ball out of the park. I said, ‘Look, if you dispute a grade, it’s not because that guy didn’t like your colour scheme and you want to get back at him. You could have had an 89. If you dispute that, the mark is thrown away, and I’m evaluating it— and I don’t give 89’s lightly! Once they got that, it was really good. So the assignment that just finished: zero disputes!”
Peer assessment when delivered effectively offers dynamic benefits compared to traditional grading by introducing new perspectives and better immersing students in the coursework through evaluation roles. Kritik takes the guesswork out of peer assessment and ensures a seamless process that not only makes managing the process easier for the professor, but makes certain the process is consistent and appropriately structured throughout the semester and regardless of activity— individual or group-based.
So, you’ve decided to adopt Kritik to implement peer assessment in your course. Our team is here to provide support to you and your students along the way.
In the meantime, we’ve compiled answers and tips for professors new to peer assessment.
Peer assessment activities involve students evaluating one another's work following instructor criteria. Compared to traditional learning (e.g. individual assignments graded directly by a TA or instructor), peer assessment introduces a new dimension of interactive learning, or learning by teaching.
Through Kritik, instructors optimize the online teaching and learning experience and get students more involved and engaged in their learning. We know peer assessment can be difficult to implement because of the organization and management involved with having students assess a range of their peers. Whether you teach 12 students or 1200 students, implementing peer assessment with Kritik will be an efficient and meaningful experience for students and professors alike.
A 2020 study on the impact of peer assessment on academic performance highlights the positive correlation between effective peer assessment activities and students’ academic performance in all levels (Double, McGrane & Hopfenbeck, 2020). Research concludes that peer assessment is more effective and formative in students’ learning experience compared to no assessment or teacher assessment (Double, McGrane & Hopfenbeck, 2020). Moreover, the findings suggest that peer assessment can be integrated across a variety of different subject areas, for different assignment types, and across different education levels (Double, McGrane & Hopfenbeck, 2020).
Here's some ways that peer assessment can help you and your students:
“[The students’] style really does develop and it becomes a very personal style and a personal voice and that’s the whole point. I think a lot of the students really enjoyed seeing other people’s work because it is especially in this kind of online pandemic space that everyone is isolated in their own bubble and you want to have some sort of authentic connection.”
To read more about peer assessment and its benefits, read our article here. For further reading, check out 6 ways peer assessment can enhance students' online learning experience.
Students tend to feel less motivated to complete assignments that they don’t understand the purpose of. After enrolling your students, take time to communicate your course objectives and desired learning outcomes while using Kritik.
Students who have never heard about Kritik may view it as just another “homework platform,” but explaining the benefits of peer assessment and how our features facilitate peer-to-peer learning will help students better understand why they are using Kritik for your course.
Particularly for professors new to Kritik, consider modifying previous assignments to include peer assessment. Our intuitive platform allows you to easily create activities, as well as automatically create groups and distribute evaluations across small, medium, and large classes.
Here are 7 ways to implement peer assessment into your online assignments. For example, students can submit their essay outlines and drafts for peer evaluation.
Book a product demo with our professor success specialists to learn how to best use Kritik for your curriculum.
Before you start, set up a calibration activity for your students to complete. Setting up a calibration activity before you deliver assignments will level your students’ grading power. A calibration activity will help you understand the starting level of evaluation for each of your students by measuring students’ evaluation scores compared to what you, the instructor, would be grading each assignment. Our Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithm will adjust the grading score over the course of the semester to allow you and the students to see how they are improving.
Read more about Calibration Activities through our Help Center.
Flexibility will increase adaptability! After creating an activity, you can schedule each stage based on the amount of work involved. Since there are three stages, there will be three deadlines to pay attention to; don’t worry, though, Kritik sends an email notification to students whenever a deadline is approaching! We recommend setting an extended deadline for all three stages for your first activity to allow you and your students time to familiarize yourselves with the platform.
Did you know that you can set a grace period for creations, as well as accept late submissions past the grace period? Setting deadlines or even extending them will allow you to see how your students are using the app, as well as provide space to clarify issues and questions with using Kritik.
Read more from our Help Center about scheduling activities and allowing late submissions.
Rubrics drastically improve the peer evaluation process for students and allow them to understand exactly what it takes to succeed in a particular activity. Research shows that teaching students how to evaluate work using rubrics for peer and self-assessment is beneficial to academic performance (Reddy & Andrade, 2010).
Interested in learning more about the rubric manager? Here's a Help Center article about creating and editing rubrics.
Read more about criteria that you could use in your rubrics to facilitate effective peer assessment.
Peer assessment aided by technology provides new ways to improve engagement, efficiency, and accountability in teaching and learning. Not only do students perform better academically when they are more engaged, but increased student engagement also encourages instructors to innovate teaching deliverables in order to yield high academic results (Errey & Wood, 2011). Peer assessment alone, won’t achieve these benefits. It must be executed effectively, and in a way that improves the professor experience, rather than adding more work. That’s where Kritik comes in.
With Kritik, both instructors and students have something to gain through the integration of peer assessment both academically and personally.
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Peer assessment, also known as peer feedback, is a learning strategy in which students analyze and provide constructive comments on the work of their peers. This type of assessment benefits students in and out of the classroom.
Peer evaluation helps students develop critical thinking and soft skills by providing and receiving feedback from their peers. To provide effective feedback, students must consider course material from a deeper level and assess how their work and the work they are reviewing addresses the learning objectives set out by their professor. Through this process, students are exposed to many perspectives and opinions, broadening their viewpoint and enriching their learning experience.
Peer evaluation helps students take greater ownership of their learning by taking an active role and engaging in the assessment process. Students consider the various ways to approach an assignment to meet the learning objectives (Cleland & Walton, 2012).
It is natural for some students to feel unsure about providing direct feedback to their peers. Like anything new, it is crucial to model strong feedback, explain the purpose of peer assessment and how they will benefit from it, and provide check-ins at frequent junctures throughout the semester. Additionally, having students conduct peer assessments anonymously is an effective way to achieve more genuine and constructive input, and it also removes assessment bias in the process.
When peer assessment is implemented without adequate explanation and support, students will often see it as busy, non-essential work. Peer assessment should be implemented like any other form of evaluation and treated with care and importance by professors and students alike. Incorporating online rubrics and clear objective criteria effectively keeps students on track with clear expectations. Additionally, students should be provided with enough time to do thorough and thoughtful work (Sitthiworachart & Joy, 2004). The Kritik team recommends having students conduct four peer assessments per activity; of course, it can deviate based on class size and type of assignment, but this can serve as a baseline.
Peer evaluations can also be impacted by friend-enemy dynamics, resulting in skewed results. There are various options for dealing with this issue. Professors should monitor peer assessments throughout the semester for evaluations that are unnecessarily high or low. These cases can be discussed privately with the student or as a group, if they are more common across the group (Sitthiworachart & Joy, 2007).
The best way to avoid the friend-enemy dynamic is to model proper assessment and provide clear objectives and a rubric for each activity. Anonymous peer assessment also effectively reduces friend-enemy dynamics as students do not know whose work they are assessing.
If students believe that the evaluation they received is not fair, it’s important to have a system to share their concerns. For example, Kritik has a “Dispute” feature where students can flag an evaluation with a note to their professor for review.
Use a rubric to ensure students provide specific and constructive feedback, rather than high-level praise to their fellow students (Orsmond et al., 2000). An online rubric sets clear expectations and guides students through the assessment process. This guidance will lead to consistent feedback across the class, but will also signal to students what areas the professor would like students to focus on.
By making the feedback process anonymous, students will be more likely to provide genuine and constructive feedback, feel more comfortable doing so, and remove assessment bias. Facilitating anonymous peer assessment can be challenging to coordinate, so using a program like Kritik to streamline the process for both professor and student can be a big help.
For students to receive the full benefit of the peer feedback process, they should be paired with a diverse range of reviewers. Even in a particular class, this can be achieved by ensuring students are reviewed and review peers with a varying range of abilities. Kritik uses artificial intelligence (AI) to set a grading score for each student based on how well they assess their peers compared to the criteria and calibration set by the professor. The platform uses the grading score to pair students from a range of grading scores.
The peer assessment process needs to include opportunities for students to improve their evaluative skills. Kritik incorporates three stages of peer assessment: Creation Stage, Evaluation Stage and Feedback Stage. In the Feedback Stage, student will provide feedback on the assessment they receive from their peers based on how critical and motivational it is. This means, over time, they will develop and build their skills and become better evaluators.
Lastly, professors should check in on students periodically throughout the semester as they would for any other assignment or activity. What does this mean?
As instructors incorporate peer assessment in their courses to bridge the transition from in-person learning to online and hybrid learning experiences, it’s critical to guide students to make the best of this opportunity. Peer assessment may not come easily to all students and is a skill that should be developed and honed throughout one’s academic and professional experience. That is where the role of an instructor is vital as they can prepare for the complications and challenges of peer assessment before introducing it in their course.
Peer assessment encourages student engagement with their peers and increases accountability while reducing the workload of educators.
Here’s what we will be covering in this article:
Peer assessment is a process wherein peers assess each others’ work and provide feedback that can help them improve the quality of their work. In this method of assessment, the evaluators and the students being assessed share a comparable status while a higher authority typically determines criteria and guidelines for the assessment. This ensures standardization of assessment procedures. When peers provide feedback at various stages of a work in progress, it is called formative peer assessment, while summative peer assessment refers to feedback received after the completion of an assignment or task. Peer assessments are widely used in classrooms, research environments, and workplaces.
Peer assessment has become an increasingly popular subject over the last three decades as it comes with many benefits to academic performance (Double, McGrane, Hopfenback, 2020). It augments engagement with the learning process, allows for varied and creative feedback, helps learners develop critical acumen, and hones interpersonal skills. Kritik streamlines this experience for students and instructors alike. When students act as reviewers or assessors, they perform the role of an instructor to their peers which improves their meta-cognitive skills. Through peer assessment, students learn by teaching, a 21st-century learning concept that engages students more deeply in their learning.
Peer assessment is an effective learning tool; however, complications may arise with students providing feedback to one another. More specifically, students who have difficulty processing critical feedback and feel vulnerable showing their work to their peers may decide to address these feelings by providing ineffective online feedback and evaluation to their peers. If a student offers insensitive or poor-quality peer feedback, it can damage their confidence and strain peer relationships (Topping, 2017).
Here are four types of ineffective feedback that result in poor peer assessment:
When students assess their peers' work, they may intentionally give poor grades in certain instances. There are many reasons why this may occur, including friction or adversity outside the classroom. It’s best to address this situation directly with the student to see if there are any personal reasons behind their decision to present unjustified negative feedback. If they are doing it to spite another student who critiqued their work, a conversation addressing the vulnerability of peer assessment, the dangers of an ineffective feedback loop, and reminders of the classroom being a safe space can go a long way.
Students providing unjustified positive grades to their friends also appear on the list of ineffective feedback examples. While this may be done in good spirits, it harms the learning experience for the student and the entire class. Peer assessment is a collaborative experience, and when done correctly, promises tremendous possibilities of providing a more enriching and meaningful learning experience while developing critical thinking skills. Reminding students that giving undeserved high grades to their friends will do more harm than good is an excellent place to start addressing the issue of effective vs ineffective feedback.
In some cases, students are careless and give everyone the same grade without adequately assessing the work. In this situation, instructors can remind students of the goal and reason for the exercise. Co-creating rubrics, creating buy-in early on, and introducing engaging activities that teach students the dynamics of effective vs ineffective feedback are instrumental in ensuring that students put thought and care into their assessments.
Pro Tip: Kritik penalizes students who give unhelpful feedback or grades that don’t reflect the quality of work. Each student gets a Grading Power that reflects how well they perform when doing peer evaluations which affects their peers’ final score.
Peer assessment is a skill that takes time to develop. Students may struggle to provide strong assessments because of a lack of knowledge of assessment criteria or unfamiliarity with assessment techniques (Karaca, 2009). Instructors must provide detailed notes and guidelines on their expectations, outline types of ineffective feedback, support students with a clear rubric, and provide timely feedback to let them know the effectiveness of their evaluations.
For peer assessment to be truly effective, it is crucial for the feedback to be insightful, critical, and constructive. However, misguided peer assessment may often lead to peers providing feedback that fails to benefit the recipients. Here are some ineffective feedback examples that help students avoid common pitfalls:
The tendency to provide feedback lacking specificity is one of the prime examples of ineffective feedback. Let us consider effective vs ineffective feedback for an essay, for instance. Comments like ‘great job!’, ‘excellent work!’ or ‘needs improvement’ without elaboration do not tell the recipient exactly which areas of the essay were appreciated by their peers and how they can further improve their work.
Feedback must be lucid and precise, and should offer specific suggestions (say on language, perspectives, background reading, etc) that help the recipient enhance their essay. Here’s an example:
While providing honest feedback is essential for peer assessment to be effective, the peer must maintain a respectful and empathetic tone while delivering feedback. Unduly harsh or demeaning criticism may do more harm than good. In a creative writing assignment, for example, feedback that says ‘You clearly have no talent for writing. Just give up already!’ is an instance of ineffective feedback.
More effective feedback could state something like ‘Your story has potential but it could benefit further from stronger character development.’ Students have to remember that the aim of peer assessment is to motivate peers to improve and not to demoralize or break them down.Here’s an example:
A major difference between effective and ineffective feedback is the presence of actionable suggestions. Meaningful feedback goes beyond the simple identification of problems. It must help the recipient work on the problem by suggesting alternative approaches, specific resources, or practical recommendations.
Instead of simply writing ‘The essay lacks structure,’ effective feedback would have suggestions like ‘Consider beginning your essay with a clear introduction that provides an overview of your principal argument and sets the tone for the essay’ or ‘Consider using subheadings or bullet points to help the reader locate the key points in your essay.’ Here’s an example:
Usually peer assessment is guided by certain predetermined criteria. Providing feedback that does not align with the evaluation criteria often leads to directionless and ineffective feedback. For instance, feedback like ‘You should consider enriching your vocabulary’ for a conceptual assignment in Mathematics or Economics may not be effective feedback since the aim of the assignment in such cases is usually not to test vocabulary. It is essential to follow the rubrics created by the instructor in order to avoid this form of ineffective feedback.
The following rubrics will provide a clear idea of the evaluation criteria of the assignment and allow for structured and effective feedback. Here’s an example:
The feedback that takes the form of personal criticism or insults can heavily undermine the benefits of peer assessment. It may lead to a hostile classroom environment and hinder growth. Feedback such as ‘Your presentation was terrible as you have no public speaking skills and your voice is annoying,’ is an example of ineffective feedback since it attacks the presenter without providing constructive criticism of the presentation itself.
It is important to remember that peer assessment should focus on constructive feedback that supports learning and growth. By avoiding personal attacks and maintaining a respectful and professional approach, peer reviewers can create a safe, supportive, and truly collaborative environment.
Pro Tip: Kritik is committed to fostering a safe space during peer assessment. Accordingly, all peer evaluations via Kritik are anonymous which prevents instances of personal attacks.
Kritik allows students to engage in assessing the peer feedback they receive and creates a 360-degree feedback loop that enables effective peer assessment. By positioning peer assessment as a learning opportunity and facilitating classroom discussions on its benefits, instructors can ensure a successful implementation.
If you are curious to see how Kritik works, set up your free account and schedule the first assignment for your students.
We learn from each other. As babies, we learned by watching our parents. As youth, we observe and unintentionally and intentionally analyze peers, situations and surroundings to form social cues. As adults, we learn how and when to be adaptable, flexible and to assert ourselves. While the ebb and flow of responding, reacting and learning happens every day, educators have found ways to make this learning a purposeful experience in the classroom. This is referred to as peer assessment.
Many professors have incorporated peer evaluation, or peer assessment, to encourage trust within the classroom, online or in person. Peer assessment can make learning more engaging and provide opportunities for students to develop higher-order skills.
In 2013, Catherine Moore and Susan Teather, out of Edith Cowen University in Australia, conducted a study to gauge how peer assessment was received by students. Their surveys found students appreciated being able to collaborate with others, receive different inputs from peers, evoke new ideas from peers, and collaborate with those in a similar position, making it easier to empathize with others (Moore & Teather, 2013). Every student surveyed found the peer assessment process to be useful with 58.3% of students indicating their experience with peer assessment was incredibly useful, or very useful.
All this said, peer assessment has its struggles too. The study found students who disapproved of peer assessment did so for two primary reasons: 1) students did not want their peers’ marks included in their overall final mark, and 2) students did not like when peer assessment was completed solely for marking. In other words, the students wanted their professor to have the final say over their grades with the ability to override any student assessment, and they were seeking a more fulfilling assessment experience prioritizing the learning and opportunity for feedback over the specific grade.
Whatever system you chose to use to facilitate peer assessment, it should meet the needs of students, while providing a reliable and streamlined user experience. Consider checking out Kritik to enable peer assessment, while making the grading process more meaningful and efficient.
Short-term summer courses are often taken by students to accelerate their academic careers and meet program requirements in preparation for the Fall and Winter terms. These courses are typically intensive and condense a term’s worth of materials in just six weeks. Although enrolling in summer courses might appear less time-consuming compared to full-load terms, these courses contain just as much workload and in some cases, even more. The sheer amount of time and effort students invest to comprehend course concepts and complete assignments in a short amount of time are nothing short of an accomplishment. Thus, it is just appropriate that students receive a learning experience that ensures long-term academic success beyond the short time frame of six weeks.
The main concern with these summer courses is that the learning environment primes students to encode most of the knowledge they’ve gained as short-term memory. Given the relatively short timeframe of these courses and the mental stress that comes with it, traditional pedagogies used in full terms are not as effective at developing and enhancing student’s long-term memory (Vogel & Schwabe, 2016).
Oftentimes, summer courses are still structured in a manner where students complete cumulative assignments that only use lower-level thinking such as memorization. Although this promotes the improvement of students’ knowledge retrieval, the retention of the information gained greatly decays over time as the mental process of fast-paced learning mostly engages the brain’s hippocampus which is where new memories are formed and retrieved from (Jonides & al., 2008; Schapiro & al., 2017; VanElzakker, 2008).
Even though the information, encoded in memory engram cells, is also indexed in the prefrontal cortex (a part of the brain responsible for longer-term memory) at the same time it is formed in the hippocampus, the lack of repetition and knowledge rehearsal in short-term courses prohibits students from synthesizing their memories as suggested by the theory of systems consolidation of memory (SCM) (Ghazizahdeh, 2018; Trafton, 2017; Tonegawa & al., 2018).
Thus, the engram cells stored in both the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex differ in utilization rate depending on the specific task at hand (Trafton, 2017). This dictates the strength of the memory and encodes it either as short-term or long-term (Cowan, 2008; Jonides, 2008). In the case of short-term courses, students simply don’t have the long time horizon to fully consolidate their knowledge and strengthen their memory as long-term in the prefrontal cortex using traditional pedagogies.
As mentioned earlier, memorization is more utilized for short-term courses as materials are extremely condensed. However, it is a well-known fact that repetition, instead of memorization, improves overall knowledge retention (Karpicke, 2016). Repetition in the form of knowledge rehearsal is not the same as memorization as the act of repeating involves experiencing the same learning process whereas memorization is closely associated with just knowledge retrieval (Karpicke, 2016).
Now that the difference is apparent, the reason why short-term courses utilize less knowledge rehearsal is that repeating high-quality activities under the same instruction is very time-consuming and labour intensive. Given the short timeframe, it is nearly impossible for instructors to frequently administer thought-provoking written assignments of the same calibre as time is a great limitation.
Teaching strategies should be dynamic based on students’ learning requirements and the pacing of the learning process in order to ensure long-term success. There are numerous proven research on certain pedagogies that are applicable for short-term learning that also assist in the development and strengthening of long-term memory. According to a journal on behavioural and brain science, “long-term memory is triggered by spaced learning” which is a method where information is consolidated in “condensed bursts with intervals of breaks” (Kang, 2016).
In other words, spaced learning is a practice where knowledge rehearsal is implemented routinely. Spaced learning is a more structured pedagogy that applies the same learning process multiple times while incorporating old materials with new information. As such, by frequently revisiting previous memories and creating new ones in an organized and timely manner, engram cells in both the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex are utilized thereby developing both short-term and long-term memories (Jonides, 2008; Trafton, 2017).
Kritik’s peer assessment takes advantage of spaced learning and repetition as students engage in the material in condensed burst multiple times with intervals of breaks. Students undergo three stages of knowledge creation and rehearsal wherein they submit their assignment, evaluate their peers and provide feedback on the evaluations. Every time students engage in the material in each of the timely-scheduled stages, previous knowledge on the topic is interlaced with the new information received from several of their peers’ assignments thereby utilizing both parts of the brain responsible for encoding short-term and long-term memory. Peer assessment has endless benefits for instructors and students alike.
Moreover, peer assessment amplifies the effects of spaced learning as students are tasked to revisit thought-provoking written submissions which allow them to compare their work, synthesize different perspectives and make personal connections (Pressley & al., 1989). Doing so also engages the amygdala of the brain which is responsible for memory consolidation and transferring new learning to long-term memory (Squire & al., 2015; OpenStax, 2020). By using peer assessment, students are able to use space learning which promotes efficient and effective knowledge storage for both short-term and long-term success. All the while, instructors are not burdened with the extreme grading workload associated with administering high-quality assignments.
Given the limited timeframe of summer courses, implementing and applying proven pedagogies that assist in the development of long-term memory while being suitable for fast-paced environments is a high priority. In order to ensure students are getting the most out of their summer courses, it is important that the knowledge they’ve gained retains throughout their academic careers and beyond. Unlike traditional pedagogies used in current short-term courses, peer assessment facilitates cognitive learning to meet instructors’ teaching objectives and students’ learning requirements within a short amount of time.
One of the most common misconceptions about peer evaluation is that it opens up opportunities for unqualified students to grade one another which leads to an increased amount of grade disputes. As such, this belief manifests skepticism towards peer evaluation due to the idea that it will increase professors’ workload associated with resolving disputes and rectifying grades.
In reality, peer evaluation does the opposite and significantly reduces grade disputes as a result of multiple perspective reasoning brought by open peer-to-peer discourse. A research on Multiple perspective dynamic decision making explains that “decision making often involves deliberations in different perspectives” (Leong, 1998). Dynamic problem solving requires obtaining as much information on viable solutions to understand commonalities and underlying disagreements. Although Leong’s paper refers to multiple-perspective reasoning in artificial intelligence, the premise of this particular decision-making strategy is mapped out based on its usefulness and advantages in human intelligence and real-world conflict resolutions. In peer evaluation, students are exposed to various solutions which allow them to reflect on their own understanding while internalizing their peers’ approach to problems.
Also, the practice of receiving multiple assignments for dynamic problem solving relates to the law of large numbers which entails that as a probabilistic process is repeated multiple times, the theoretical assumptions meet real-world expectations (Salkind, 2010). In the case of peer evaluation, increasing students’ exposure to other perspectives creates an environment where students get a consensus of the most probable ‘real-world expectation’ which in this situation is the most viable answer to specific assignments.
Furthermore, a study on peer evaluation and the quality of feedback shows that students “exhibit a greater sense of what is expected of them, improvements in the quality of feedback produced, and positive perceptions reported by the recipient who gets the feedback from the peer” after participating in multiple peer evaluations (Anderson & al., 2020). Additionally, at the end of the experiment, the instructors assessed the quality of the feedback after collecting multiple peer evaluations and identified that they were reflective of the students’ actual academic progress.
Although the study focused on biomedical students, the results achieved from the experiment can be replicated for various STEM and non-STEM courses as the premise of peer evaluation emphasize the avenue for developing professional skills required in academia and beyond to effectively self-reflect. The concept that peer evaluation reduces grade disputes can be proven through this study’s finding that students perceived the feedback as positive and that it improved students’ outlook on their own work by having multiple perspectives.
The more comparative assessments students do, the better their understanding of concepts will be. However, this can only be applicable if the same random process is repeated a large number of times. In traditional peer evaluation, students are affected by internal and external biases as the process is not anonymous and assignments are distributed in a manner that is inconsistent. This decreases the randomness of the distribution which is a key aspect of the law of large numbers thus affecting the evaluations.
However, with Kritik, assignments are anonymously distributed through the platform’s algorithm which eliminates human biases thereby upholding the integrity of the randomness selection and assignment. Students’ decision-making process is positively influenced by external knowledge based upon the premise of commonality among other solutions without introducing other self-knowledge biases. Essentially, the more students are exposed to their peers’ problem-solving strategies and the more information they receive from analyzing other solutions, the better their understanding will be as they are not limited to their internal knowledge (Double & al., 2019).
As a testament to peer evaluation significantly reducing grade disputes, Kritik’s data which encompass all users across hundreds of universities show that less than 4% of students dispute their grades. Time after time, Kritik’s peer evaluation platform proves that the large majority of the students are very satisfied with the grades that they receive from their peers and that students are learning at a deeper level from having an increased opportunity to apply multiple perspective reasoning for dynamic problem-solving.
Research has shown that professors spend approximately 18 hours a week grading papers, assignments and discussion threads. This accounts for 45.67% of the total time professors allocate to various instructional activities for online teaching.
Obviously, this imposes a huge burden on professors and solutions to alleviate the heavy grading workload rely on increasing faculty numbers such as hiring more TAs. However, with the reduction in higher ed budgets triggered by the pandemic, it is less likely that TAs will be available to provide the support professors need to grade hundreds of written assignments.
This gives professors the choice to either administer more summative assessments and multiple choice-based exams which are time-convenient but less ideal for developing critical thinking skills or carry the burden of manually grading papers and assignments for the sake of providing quality education. Either way, both options leave professors fewer opportunities to provide regular feedback that are meaningful and relevant to their students’ current academic progress and goals. This lack of feedback brought by the labour-intensive nature of teaching large classes is correlated to students performing less ideal in their academics and professional careers.
Considering the increasing class sizes in first-year and upper-year courses (Cash et al., 2027), it is no doubt that students are receiving less feedback due to the lack of faculty resources and capacity. Grading 100 to 800+ students while constantly providing quality constructive criticism to individuals is just not feasible in a traditional lecture-based education system.
In multiple studies on effective strategies for applied sciences and STEM courses, it was determined that the absence of professor and TA feedback results in students relying on themselves to critically analyze their own credibility, strengths and weaknesses. This method is beneficial to developing academic reflection skills but is heavily subjected to biased self-knowledge. A psychological research on self-assessment has shown that there are weak correlations between student ability estimates and performance (Karpen, 2018). Furthermore, the lack of feedback can be perceived by students as a confirmation of their abilities and skills which deters them from further self-assessment due to the lack of guidance and external perspectives.
Receiving feedback is an essential aspect of the learning process as it allows individuals to learn and internalize their strengths and weaknesses. Not only do students improve through the comparative assessments facilitated by feedback, but they also learn to critically consider other people’s opinions and ideas in a professional manner (Shute, 2008). This life lesson is not taught as much in the current education system and is important not only to their academic success but also for their professional growth. In academia and the workplace, feedback is often provided by higher authorities and learning to be receptive to it with an open mind is an essential lesson for every individual. Understanding how to properly receive feedback is the first part of the equation.
Providing feedback is the second part and is as essential for students to learn. By being able to digest information and different perspectives to identify other people’s strengths and weaknesses, not only are they helping their peers to improve but they learn to provide constructive criticism in a manner that is actionable and motivational. This skill is vital in the workplace as well as it strengthens relationships which improves productivity, workflow and output.
However, as mentioned earlier, students are less exposed to feedback due to faculty time constraints. It has also been identified that frequent feedback is required for ideal academic performance but due to course limitations, students have fewer opportunities to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses. As such, it is important to find assessment alternatives that facilitate the receipt and provision of feedback to enhance students’ learning experience and outcome.
Kritik’s calibrated peer grading solution enables accurate and authentic student-to-student evaluations and feedback. Through the platform, students anonymously provide regular constructive criticism on their peers' work which increases course engagement levels and improves academic performance. Our survey on students’ learning outcomes using peer grading and feedback has shown that 84% of the students learned at a deeper level by evaluating their peers’ work.
The use of Kritik and peer-assessment, specifically in the STEM field, has shown to be integral for a quality online learning experience as students are given the opportunity to frequently analyze multiple perspectives and reflect on their own skills. Through Kritik’s peer grading process, students are empowered to constantly develop their ability to receive and provide feedback with approximately 63% of students saying that they became better evaluators after a few iterations.
Feedback is an integral part of students’ learning process and academic growth. However, faculty resources are limited and a large amount of professors’ time is spent towards grading. Coupled with course limitations and higher ed budget cuts, students are less exposed to feedback which affects their ability to improve their knowledge and skills.
Furthermore, receiving and providing feedback is not taught as much in the current education system. Thus, it is essential to find effective pedagogies that facilitate regular feedback without the heavy grading burden on professors. Peer grading solutions like Kritik enables students to frequently provide and receive genuine, accurate and informative evaluations which reduce the overall turnaround time for feedback and increase professors’ ability to coach students more often.
Peer assessment is a powerful tool instructors can utilize to help students learn, analyze, and engage more deeply in their understanding of course content. This is done by allowing the student to take responsibility for assessing fellow students’ work against criteria set by the instructor. Doing so allows the student the opportunity to think deeply about the criteria in order to serve as the assessor and provide feedback to their peers. Beyond simply understanding the presented material, properly implemented peer assessment can be a catalyst for more effective student learning as students apply newly acquired knowledge to the assessment process.
There are multiple benefits associated with peer assessment. Students receive more frequent feedback from peers instead of waiting for the instructor to assess all assignments. Students are also able to compare their own approach to a task or assignment with that of their fellow peers. In doing so, they can assess their own knowledge against that of their classmates. This exchange of information from multiple viewpoints enables the student to think critically about a topic in order to increase understanding. It also promotes better student motivation and engagement by allowing the student to have ownership over the process.
Beyond cognition, this kind of assessment offers opportunities to develop real-world skills that will extend outside the classroom. With appropriate guidance, students learn how to assess and critique information, make criterion-referenced judgements, and provide effective and valuable feedback to others. This naturally leads to the critical analysis and reflection required to promote deeper learning. These are important communication skills that are important in today’s collaborative environment.
Peer assessment can be utilized across many different kinds of assignments, courses and disciplines. It can be used to assess individual assignments, or it can be used to assess contributions through team-based learning. Assessment can be done openly to promote group or whole-class discussion, or it can be done anonymously to promote more honest feedback. This assessment can be a cumulative activity at the end of a large assignment, or it can be broken into smaller parts to provide feedback at various stages within the context of the larger assignment. It can also be as simple as exchanging notes in class to help uncover gaps or discrepancies in learning.
Written assignments lend themselves well to peer assessment. However, this form of assessment can be easily adapted for use with any number of assignments, such as presentations, visual displays, discussion boards, and/or performances. It is suitable for use in-person as well as virtually, and the assessment can be formative or summative. [1]
Like anything else, critical assessment of others' work is a learned skill that should be practiced with an eye toward improvement. In order for this method to be effective, the instructor must have clear and concise goals and criteria. Rubrics should be used and must clearly define the tasks for the learner and reviewer. These rubrics should be introduced in such a way that allows the learner to apply the rubric to the assignment as well as the assessment. Instructors should model how to provide appropriate feedback and criticism prior to students beginning the peer assessment process.
It can be difficult for instructors to relinquish control to allow students to provide feedback. However, feedback from peers can bridge the gap between instructor feedback and student perception in order to improve skills. This process emphasizes that mistakes provide opportunities to learn and grow so that assessment is better seen as a part of learning such as using Kritik in a way that encourages continued and ongoing learning through scaffolded assignments. The result can often be a more sophisticated understanding of the content as well as the learning process. [2]
As more classes move online in the wake of the pandemic, it’s increasingly important for faculty to stay on top of student progress, performance and general well-being. Peer assessment allows for students and their peers to stay in close contact with instructors through regular assignments that provide feedback for improvement. In large online classes, peer assessment can create room for assignments where the creative output of students would otherwise be very difficult to grade with automation or to manage with additional teaching staff.
Formative assessment expert Heidi Andrade, an associate professor in the School of Education at the University at Albany, SUNY, has worked with schools across the U.S. to promote learning-centered assessment. As part of Arts Achieve, a large-scale arts assessment research project undertaken in 2010-2015 by Studio in a School and the New York City Department of Education’s Office of Arts and Special Projects, Andrade created a series of videos on implementing formative and peer assessment in the classroom.
According to Andrade, there are three main criteria for effectively implementing formative assessment:
Research shows that formative assessment, when effectively implemented, “can effectively double the speed of student learning” (Wiliam, 2007).
“If we’re just giving students grades or scores, that doesn’t count as assessment that promotes learning,” says Andrade. “What counts as assessment that promotes learning is when students get feedback on their strengths and weaknesses, guidance on how to improve their own work and an opportunity to work on the improvement.”
For most faculty, that’s a pipe dream. Delivering personalized feedback in a class of 50 (or worse, a class of 400) is next to impossible. But that’s where peer assessment can come into play.
“The teacher is not the sole source of quality feedback in the room,” says Andrade. “Under the right conditions, students can be useful sources of feedback for themselves and for each other.”
For peer assessment to work, says Andrade, strong criteria and descriptive levels of quality, or rubrics, are foundational.
“For me, the most important purpose of rubrics is to support students in thinking about the quality of their own and each others’ work and guiding revision.” The criteria guide the critique, which needs to be constructive, seeking clarification and should lead to suggestions that will improve the work.
“You cannot give good feedback on a piece of work that you don’t understand,” says Andrade. “You have to ask questions of clarification that can’t be thinly-veiled critiques.”
Rubrics, according to Andrade, can improve student performance, as well as monitor it; help students become more thoughtful judges of the quality of their own and others’ work; reduce the amount of time teachers spend evaluating student work; and finally, they’re easy to use and explain what is expected of students (Learn more about Kritik's customized rubrics here).
Every class and every discipline has different types of assignments that can be effective forms of peer assessment. And while there’s no single solution for any course, there’s a wide variety of assignments that are well-suited to peer assessment.
Let your students experiment with practical skills under the watchful eye of their peers. Often, the feedback they receive is more candid and valuable than what they might get from a tutor, whose presence might actually inhibit a student’s ability to perform in the first place. It’s more natural and likely to generate more useful feedback in something like a lab report when the ideas are coming from a group of peers.
There’s good and bad practice in writing lab reports and doing case analysis—when students hear about it from their peers it helps them become more aware of how important coherence, structure and layout can be on the final product.
A quick and easy assessment strategy, looking for correct answers in peer work—like performing code reviews in engineering, etc.—opens a window into where their peers went wrong/right in their thinking. By seeing the errors others have made by evaluating their logic, notation and problem solving skills, students can pinpoint trouble spots to avoid in future.
Let your students know what to look for in their peers’ presentations: Are they presuming too much knowledge? Are they talking too much and not engaging the room? Is their argument logical? Armed with the right guidelines they’ll be able to make sound judgements on the work of their peers and gain insights in how they might improve their own work.
Harness the power of your student’s curiosity—assign them the task of creating questions about the lecture that are shared with the rest of the class. Not only will their peers have the chance to improve their own understanding by answering the question, they can evaluate the quality and usefulness of it, providing feedback for improvement.
Before they share the final paper, get your students to share their essay outlines too. By reviewing how others plan their content and structure their arguments before actually writing an essay, this kind of scaffolding assignment allows students to share a wide variety of ideas for improvement in a short period of time and to apply the lessons learned to their own essay writing in future. When it comes time to evaluate the final submission, students can see how their peers’ thinking evolved from the original plan, giving them insight into the quality of feedback that was provided—and how it was applied—along the way.
To implement team-based learning, break your class up into diverse groups of 5-7 students who will be working together during class time (whether that's online or in-person). Before each class, students are asked to prepare by doing a set of readings, which they're quickly evaluated on at the start of class to gauge comprehension. Spend the remainder of the class working in groups on problems or challenges that allow the student teams to apply and extend what they've learned in the pre-class readings. Groups must arrive at a consensus solution to the problem they've been tasked with and present it to the class for discussion and feedback. A version of the flipped classroom, the kind of interactive engagement methods used in team-based learning have been shown to result in learning gains almost two standard deviations higher than those observed in traditional courses.
Regardless of its well-established ability to develop self-reflection, resourcefulness and gains not seen with external evaluation (Pintrich 1995; Pintrich and Zusho 2007; Dow et al. 2012), peer assessment is still viewed with some skepticism by many faculty, who remain reticent to put it into practice.
“Part of why I don't think other colleagues pick up on peer assessment is that they know it's a tough sell to students,” says Alexander Gainer, an associate economics professor at the University of Alberta. It’s more work than many students want to put in, he continues. At Dalhousie University, professor Matt Numer concurs, adding that many of his colleagues are also “scared that peer assessment will make them lose control of the class.”
Peer assessment does change the role of teachers in the classroom. In a 2013 Stanford University/Coursera paper entitled “Peer and Self Assessment in Massive Online Classes,” researchers found that when peer assessment provides the primary evaluative function, the instructor’s role shifts to emphasize coaching, not grading. That’s why it’s important to establish “explicit grading criteria (especially in advance) [that] helps convey to students that grading is fair, consistent, and based on the quality of their work.”
When peer assessment provides the primary evaluative function, the instructor’s role shifts to emphasize coaching, not grading.
The knock-on effect is that professors will end up spending more time articulating the grading criteria than doing the grading. To effectively scale peer assessment, “teachers should plan on revising rubrics as they come across unexpected types of strong and weak work. After revision, these rubrics can scale well for both students and other teachers to use.” (Kulkarni et al. 2013)
“You end up having to do more work on the front end to design good activities for students,” says Numer, “but then in many of my classes I'm just wandering around while they're doing work. If I'm the one that's in the classroom and bored because they are researching and doing whatever, that's the end game. You should be teaching yourself out of a job.”
That newly freed-up time affords professors the opportunity to do more personalized coaching, and to focus on the students who need their help the most.
One of the Stanford researchers’ most remarkable results reported that students felt that assessing others’ work was “an extremely valuable learning activity.”
Peer assessment is a win-win for students and the professors who are bold enough to put it into practice: Students get to learn invaluable critical thinking skills by teaching others, while professors who surrender some of their traditional assessment tasks to students find themselves with more time to work directly with students. The ideas that hold students and professors back from trying out peer assessment—fear of more work for students; loss of control for professors—are the very things that are solved by it.
When students are asked to provide constructive feedback via peer instruction, the act itself engages them in complex problem solving—they have to diagnose problems and suggest solutions, actions that are the hallmarks of higher-order thinking. Studies have shown that the act of delivering elaborate feedback that describes identifiable problems and proposed scaffolded solutions is the aspect of peer assessment that benefits student learning the most (Topping et al. 2013). Lundstrom and Baker (2009) found that assessing a peer's written work was more beneficial than being assessed by a peer, and some research raises the possibility that the benefit of peer assessment comes more from assessing, rather than being assessed (Usher 2018).
Finding time to deliver frequent, meaningful feedback is one of faculty’s greatest challenges—it’s often cited as one the main factors limiting students’ opportunity to practice writing and get feedback on their work (Cho and Schunn 2007). With peer assessment, students can receive feedback on multiple assignments in a timely manner from a variety of perspectives—free from the power dynamics inherent in a teacher-student relationship—adding a diversity of viewpoints to their learning.
The feedback process involved in peer assessment encourages active learning—students aren’t simply being passive recipients of instructor feedback, they’re producing and sharing it themselves (Liu and Carless 2006; Cartney 2010; Nicol 2011). And, since the feedback can be delivered more quickly, it offers students opportunities to improve their work through revision or by applying what they’ve learned to future assignments. The opportunity to apply what they’ve learned through practice and quality feedback will positively impact student learning (Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick 2006).
Peer assessment can be an act of humility—by assessing the work of their peers, students glean a better understanding of their own work, honing their metacognitive capacity to recognize holes in their own understanding. Rather than overestimating or underestimating their own work, the act of peer assessment can train students to self-correct and become less dependent on feedback from instructors, making them more independent in their learning (Nicol, Thomson and Breslin 2014).
Anytime a student is asked to assess the work of their peers, they’re also actively comparing it to their own by referencing assignment guidelines and criteria, instructor expectations and perceptions of quality (Baker 2016; Nicol, Thomson and Breslin 2014). By becoming critical readers of others’ writing, students are also developing a better understanding of how readers might interpret the work they produce themselves (Cho and Cho 2011; MacArthur 2010). The comparative process encourages self-improvement and clarity of purpose in writing.
As preparation for life outside of school, peer assessment helps students develop the transferable skills they’ll need to succeed. The process prepares them to be able to critically review and engage with the work of their peers, enables them to be able to deliver feedback in constructive, positive ways and to learn how to incorporate the feedback they receive from others into their own work without losing their cool. These are the very skills that are in demand in the knowledge economy—by honing them in an academic environment, students will be better prepared to function independently for the duration of their lives.
Research strongly supports the use of peer assessment as a formative practice for improving overall academic performance. Overall, findings indicate that peer assessment can be more effective than teacher assessment. Additionally, with the shift to online or remote learning, studies have shown that peer assessment online can significantly reduce the logistical burden of implementing peer assessment (Tannacito and Tuzi 2002). See how hundreds of educators are using Kritik for peer assessment activities here.
Today, our news cycle is dominated by the protests erupting around the world as a result of racial injustice and systemic racism. In a recent blog post, we discussed the impact COVID school closures had on students, and analyzed why minority students (both in terms of race & economic status) were disproportionately negatively affected by the school closures. Building an equitable learning environment – where students of different races and economic status have access to an education that is fitting to their own unique circumstances is a challenge plaguing not just educators, but institutions and policymakers alike. With endless solutions to a complex problem continuously being discussed, it may be hard for some educators to figure out where to begin. In today’s post we wanted to discuss a particular area educators have a direct impact on, and that is grading. We will break down the biases existing in the current grading system today and learn how equitable grading policies can be developed and how to build an equitable learning environment for their students by improving how they grade their students work.
The hallmark of any university experience for students are the assessments they will undergo; from quizzes, exams to final papers, assignments are a regular part of a students life. Assignments are created and graded on the discretion of the instructor; while instructors are certainly subject-matter experts in the field, many are not taught how to grade properly. The prerequisites to become an educator are rooted in their ability to convey their expertise, but often, how they are able to assess others’ understanding of their expertise is not standardized from one institution to another. While some institutions certainly offer training and support for their educators to assist in grading and class instruction, not all do. This disparity in itself is an affront to educational equity.
The result of this imbalance is that student grading standards differ not just from one middle school or high school to another, but from department to department from within the same institution and sometimes within the very same class, as multiple teaching assistants often aid a single professor to grade their class’ work. While some instructors may argue that regular discussions on grade standardization occurs, unfair grading procedures are still present. Here are 2 examples of unfair grading practices which most educators are deploying right now:
Subjectivity grading such as participation or “student effort” is based on a professors/teaching assistant’s perception of their student’s engagement. While you can certainly count the amount of times a student raises their hand in class, how do you rank thoughtfulness? What makes a student question a good one? These questions are not black and white, but rather grey, and unfortunately differ from instructor to instructor.
Educators assess students based on how they perform in relation to each other as opposed to a student’s individual merits. Why can’t 8 students in a class receive an A if they in fact deserve it, even though the department mandated only 5 students to receive an A? Grading on a curve pegs students against one another as the spots available for the top grades are pre-determined.
While these approaches are commonly used, there are professors, departments and institutions out there who are actively seeking new ways to improve their grading structure to ensure each of their students receive fair and equitable grades based on their efforts.
Stop subjective-based grading: Traditional grading practices have become a barrier to meaningful student learning. If you can’t translate ‘participation’ or ‘student effort’ into a standardized grading scheme, then do not deploy these grading criteria. Look for tools like a discussion board where student engagement is tracked & monitored throughout the course. Being able to quantify participation whereby it is no longer subjective will be imperative in ensuring an educator's inherent bias or prejudice is not taken into account.
Peer to peer assessment if often celebrated by students as an opportunity to receive feedback on their work without the threat of bias opinion being present, because they evaluate each other's work anonymously. Peer to peer assessment also ensures more unique and diverse opinions are recognized.
Providing clearly outlined rubrics for each assignment that show students a pathway to succeed will help students frame their work and ensure subjectivity on the part of the grader, is greatly reduced.
The strategies I presented above are great for individual instructors to begin deploying in their classes today, but they do not take into account the lack of grade standardization across departments and institutions. It is therefore incumbent on department chairs to offer their educators group sessions and instructor-to-instructor grading review sessions where policies and gaps can be identified and actioned on. Equitable grading practices should be adopted that are more accurate, bias resistant, reduce grade inflation and motivating them to a stronger teacher-student relationships, less stressful classrooms, reduced failure rates, improved student's behavior.
There is no simple solution for equitable classrooms; it takes time, planning and commitment from all levels of academia, but it is necessary. Technology like Kritik can help educators build an equitable classroom environment by removing the subjectivity barriers inherently present in grading. But the solution to this systemic problem is greater than a single technology can offer, but with commitment, an equitable classroom is achievable for all students, regardless of their background or personal circumstances. Many teachers include criteria such as effort, participation, extra credit, group work or homework in a student’s grade.
“Most teachers believe that students who try should not fail regardless of whether they actually learn, but other teachers believe the opposite: that fairness is honestly reporting academic performance regardless of effort,” says Joe Feldman, CEO of Crescendo Education Group, teacher, principal and a district administrator, in his book Grading for Equity: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How It Can Transform Schools and Classroom (Corwin Press, 2018).
By contrast, more equitable grading practice looks like:
Most professors we hear from want to assess their students on higher levels and that if current assessments kept student at the lowest level of Bloom’s Taxonomy, they wouldn’t feel rewarded as educators.
However, assessment is by far the most labor-intensive part of teaching. Assessment plans and rubrics must be prepped. Test questions must be written. Every student needs a mark, personalized feedback and a road-map for improvement. The larger the class, the more work for the instructor. Add in formative assessments like weekly assignments and exercises that precipitate subtle, ongoing tweaks to the syllabus and it’s easy to see why many faculty opt to stick with what they know: An accumulation of easy-to-grade summative assessments that almost inevitably rely on rote learning of the most basic concepts rather than creative thinking or problem solving skills - the lower orders of thinking outlined in Bloom’s Taxonomy.
“Summative assessment provides a safety net for instructors,” says Matthew Numer, a professor in the School of Health and Human Performance at Dalhousie University. “When you have competition for your time, you're going to default to something that's already worked.”
Here at Kritik, we have a suggestion: Try a peer-to-peer curation activity.
Cambridge Dictionary defines Curation as "the selection of content such as documents, music, videos, or articles to be included as part of a list or collection" (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/curation).
In a Higher Ed setting, curation has plenty of potential as an academic task. Jennifer Gonzalez, creator of the Cult of Pedagogy, puts it perfectly:
"Sure, we’re used to assigning research projects, where students have to gather resources, pull out information, and synthesize that information into a cohesive piece of informational or argumentative writing. This kind of work is challenging and important, and it should remain as a core assignment throughout school, but how often do we make the collection of resources itself a stand-alone assignment?" (https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/curation/).
Curation Activities can be one of the most effective teaching strategies to help students compare what they’re learning in the classroom and gain insight into how they can relate to each other. Curation projects have the potential to put your students to work at multiple levels of Bloom's Taxonomy:
Benjamin Bloom in his 1956 book, "Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals." Higher-order thinking skills are reflected by the top three levels in Bloom’s Taxonomy
Understand → where we exemplify and classify information
Analysis and Synthesis → consists of breaking down ideas, drawing connections and finding evidence
Evaluate → rejecting or defending a stand or decision based on a set of criteria
Curation Activities can apply to all disciples, such as Business, Arts, or Sciences. For example, you can have students collect a set of articles, images, videos, or other sources based on a set of criteria ("Most interesting brand strategy campaigns" or "The world's most infectious diseases") and rank them in some kind of order, justifying their rankings with a short written explanation. Students are findings examples of a given course concept and doing some summarizing and justification work's at the Understand, Analyze and Evaluate levels of Bloom's. When students explain what they’ve learned, to other students, they help consolidate and strengthen connections to those concepts while simultaneously engaging in active learning. Find more project ideas here.
Unfortunately, that default is failing students in high school and their ability to develop key skills in such uncertain times. The lower order thinking skills involves basic skills like memorization, while the higher order requires the understanding and application of knowledge. It was seen that higher level thinking made students problem solvers when given problems with new situation to solve. Moreover the ability of visualization, inferring, brain storming, critical thinking, creativity, metacognition were also seen to improve in students of a higher level than in students with a lower level thought process. To teach students to develop thinking skills, teachers need to design activities that require students to process information at the highest levels such as:
Most of the above activities would not necessarily be academically challenging or time consuming if students merely had to assemble the collection and add a thoughtfully designed written component. For more effective learning outcomes, we recommend adding a component of peer assessment into the Curation Activity. For the previous example, instructors could use Kritik to have students submit their ranked list, and then also anonymously evaluate a set numbers of their peers lists through a set of predefined rubric criteria. By actively engaging with their classmates and applying their own evaluative skills to feedback they’re delivering to their peers, student's ability of creative thinking and critical thinking skills improves. Additionally, peer assessment is proven to be effective in getting students faster feedback from diverse sources, increases meta-cognition, independence and self-reflection, and improves student learning. These are all important skills that provide value far beyond the classroom. More details on the benefits of peer assessment here.
Kritik is an online peer-to-peer interactive learning platform designed for professors to engage students in a 21st century way. Students can make online submissions for assigned activities and be evaluated based on rubrics designed to help students emulate a professor-standard grading process. Students will also receive constructive written feedback from their peers. When you assess your peer's work, you receive a grading score for critical thinking based on the fairness of your evaluation and a feedback score on the effectiveness of your written comment. The grading score and feedback score are known together as the Evaluation score. They are calculated and adjusted automatically by Kritik’s scoring system. Instructors and TAs maintain full visibility into the peer review process and have the ability to provide comments and ultimately finalize activities.
Researchers, educators, and policymakers are increasingly focused on student engagement as the key to addressing problems of low achievement, student boredom and alienation, and high dropout rates (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, and Paris 2004). Managing large classes takes much of effort and planning than teaching smaller classes.
Be it online learning sessions or traditional lectures, irrespective of the class size, the lecture hall, a large class is the one that feels like one. There are important considerations that are to be made to manage and deliver effectively. To manage a large class it is important to make pre-class decisions. Research states that traditional lectures to a class, do not help students to retain much of the information. For students to be involved in active learning in the lecture, other strategies with additional resources are required.
Due to the economic collapse, and the loss of jobs due to the current conditions in the times of COVID, there have been remarkably larger classes in public institutions. For new teachers, or teachers who are new to the recent trends of virtual online classes.
In small group discussions, where the students are segregated into groups of 7 to 10 students each, they are given a topic to discuss and learn about among the groups. To assess whether each student had an active participation in the group work, the teacher may randomly pick students from the group and check whether they can answer questions regarding the topic. Often the quiet students in the large groups get less airtime. A turn talk can help each student to participate.
Discussing learning objects in a small class may take around 20 minutes while discussing the same topics with a large enrollment class probably takes twice the time. If not planned, the ring to the next class will ring and you will not have probably covered the important topics for the specific day.
In a class with a large number of students, every student can't get on time with their teachers. Unfortunately, relations with students suffer a lot, especially in online or large lecture classes.
Consider new ways like taking surveys every two to three weeks, for students to get a chance to ask their questions, and keep different students in focus each time. Invite the students to talk about their interests, achievements, and challenges they are facing.
Loud does not always mean random discussions. If your classroom management skills are being questioned for not keeping your students quiet, understand that loud is what you get from enthusiastic learners.
Peer assessment means involving studies in their learning. Research shows that self and peer assessment enhances teaching and learning effectiveness by helping them to develop their critical thinking and reflective skills and boost their self-confidence. Self-assessment “Students are directed to assess their performance against pre-determined standard criteria…[and] involves the students in goal setting and more informal, dynamic self-regulation and self-reflection” (Bourke & Mentis, 2011, p. 859).
It is challenging to assess the progress of students learning while teaching a lecture or seminar, no matter how interactive it may be. Multiple-choice tests or iClicker questions are currently the most common forms of standardized testing to assess students' learning progress in class. While it may be convenient and easy to implement, the results only show if a student reaches an answer rather than how they reach that answer. In addition, insights from these tests help professors to understand if the class as a whole is doing well or poorly but lacks information on areas of improvement for each student.
In a digital-first world, institutions are now slowly adopting e-learning tools, and learning games to offer new assessment methods for students. It's become known as the invisible, integrated assessment method where students are more engaged beyond regular testing. The key advantage for professors is that many of these platforms offer a versatile dashboard, that tracks student performance data from learning activities. Gaining valuable insights into the skills coverage and student expectations regarding student learning will allow teachers to gain a holistic view of the academic performance of their students.
Peer assessment can vary depending on the learning goals and is often characterized as taking either a formative or summative approach. Researches show that peer assessment has various benefits and improves student learning by;
The concept of peer assessment is broad and has various types. These are the things to be considered while selecting choosing peer assessment technique:
Typically, final grades consist of tests, quizzes, and exams collected over the semester all of which follow the same style of assessment and testing. On the note of testing, rarely can evaluation skills be measured through these conventional assessments. As most undergraduate education programs do not teach evaluative skills, students cannot make sound judgments and identify right from wrong.
Integrating peer assessment into classrooms will help students identify their skill gaps and understand where their knowledge is weak [2]. It helps both professors and students to focus their attention on learning and set realistic goals. Students are motivated to revise their work and track their progress with more peer assessment-related activities. As a professor, you coach your students through the rubric criteria you create, and in the expectations you state, teach them how to apply them when grading each other work. A valuable assessment tool to help students self-reflect and take responsibility for their learning [2].
To create an inclusive educational environment while measuring the learning progress of students, integrating Kritik's calibrated peer review as a method of peer assessment is a great way to achieve this. Students reap the benefits of receiving immediate and consistent feedback on their creations.
In Professor Gainer's first-year economics class, students were able to identify what poor and strong questions generated by the students look like, which demonstrates their knowledge of a subject.
As a professor, you have full visibility of all stages at any time. Additionally, you can track progress by seeing how an individual student's scores and critical thinking skills have changed over time.
Tracking how well students are evaluating one another can be seen through their Kritik score and the star ranks they receive. As progress is tracked online, professors will have a better understanding of when to move to the next level of the course (1). Kritik gamifies assessment by enabling the students to earn points as they complete the course activities.
Peer evaluation is carried about by evaluators generally for the purpose of improvement in the teaching methods. The evaluation criteria can either be done through a formative or a summative review for new hiring or promotional purpose. Often self evaluation forms are developed to assess contribution, performance, skills, competencies, team work or attitude of students, team members and faculty members.
Critical and motivational peer feedback increases productivity, overall knowledge retention and yields higher quality work from students. Here are some tips and best practices for creating activities and structuring peer evaluations:
The outcome that you should look for in a peer evaluation is validity. What this means is that a student peer evaluation should mimic the same depth, thought process and insight as a professor’s evaluation. This is a clear marker of success, because a professor’s marking abilities are typically held to the golden standard. Not to mention that a valid student evaluation proves that grading automation is sustainable because it replicates that of a professor’s.
Reliability is measured by the consistency among peer evaluations. Unless a piece of work is subjective, a collection of peer evaluations must point to a general direction in order to provide value. This can only occur when evaluations are consistent across the board, in terms of evaluation depth or given score. Kritik implements a variety of features to help ensure
For written work, essays should not exceed more than 1,000 words. As you might imagine, students can provide more precise constructive feedback on content that is shorter in length. This leaves less room for too much variation in evaluations, and students are prompted to make more consistent conclusions among themselves.
Even the number of words on evaluations should also be limited as well, in order to ensure that effective, regular and concise feedback is given. According to a study conducted by West Virginia University, feedback should not exceed 50 words or more.
Keep your rubrics clear and concise. Give examples and indicators of poor, moderate, and excellent bodies of work. In terms of transferring professional knowledge to your students, clarify your thought process as well as tips and tricks that you use throughout your grading process. Naturally, this boosts the validity of your student’s evaluations, as you help shape an evaluation process that mirrors that of your own. Guide them to give constructive feedback for further improvement.
An excessive number of assigned evaluations will exhaust the student and their time, which can deplete the quality and validity of the peer evaluations despite adequate training and instruction. At the same time, the accuracy of grading will be compromised if only one or two peer evaluations are provided for a given work. According to a few studies conducted by Georgia State University and Pennsylvania State University, the optimum number of individuals to review is between four and six.
The coronavirus pandemic has made us shift to virtual classrooms, where the struggle to teach with maximum efficiency has reduced. To find of what things we lack in the online classroom, compared to a traditional one is by moving through a peer review process repeatedly. The peer evaluation process are also helpful to assess the efforts of group members of group projects, how much each student has contributed to the group work assignment.
Critical and motivational feedback increases productivity, overall knowledge retention, and more quality in students' work. In turn, peer feedback is essential to:
For starters, students are building an investment in their writing or ability to solve problems. It helps students understand the relationship between their work and their course expectations. Students learn from what peers have to say from the feedback received on the assignment in the form of peer review. This may look like how to interpret different methodologies if there is more than one way to reach the answer or having peers ask complex questions that further increases curiosity.
One of the clearest benefits of peer review is having students identify errors in one another's submission. Automatic grading systems can determine if a statement was right or wrong but for subjective related work, it does not provide the why. This is important for students to improve from their mistakes for long term growth.
For courses that do not incorporate group related work and rely heavily on independent studying, using online peer review tools can be a great way to ensure that students feel aligned. For certain complex subject matters, open-ended assignment expectations can make students feel more anxious or reliant on their abilities which might be ill-suited to your class discussions when approaching assignments. By reviewing peers' assignments through formative assessment, allows students to have contemporary models to explore and adopt whether it be for writing, presentation techniques, etc.
Positive and constructive feedback further encourages and motivates students as they progress through a course. Simply knowing that you have been meeting or going beyond assignment expectations is a great sign that you are achieving the desired learning outcome (1). What's even better is that students learn the skills of providing effective feedback and learn to deal with negative feedback, so that it empowers educators and students to be more effective in the feedback process.
Some of our very own professors use Kritik as an online peer assessment tool for professional development. Professor Nada Basir uses the feedback students provide to one another in teaching entrepreneurship. This serves as a means of communication improvement to make students concise when articulating problems. Constructive criticism or positive feedback is relevant for personal and professional development.
Increase leadership and communication
Basically, effective teaching incorporates collaborative learning, self-assessment and regulation, meta-cognition, and peer tutoring. All of these are the primary components of an effective peer review. So, how can a peer review be effective for student learning? Below are some steps you can take:
Encouraging students to make specific and actionable critiques can pose a challenge for teachers. Teachers may scaffold the learning process with feedback rubrics. These rubrics focus more on student support while having formative assessment through feedback.
Moreover, teachers may co-create the rubrics with their students upon formulating the criteria. This will help develop their understanding of good work. In turn, they will opt for the peer review process.
Students tend to fear the peer review process in the case that they receive unfair feedback from their peers. To prevent this, we recommend for instructors to moderate the process through Kritik. Kritik allows for instructors to read student evaluations and add comments on ineffective feedback. Other features allow students to flag feedback and dispute grades to ensure that any insufficient feedback can be easily dealt with.
Kritik's peer evaluation process allows students to provide feedback on the feedback they are receiving. Students can give a rating based on how critical and motivation the feedback they received was. This step helps students become better reviewers and encourages them to be more receptive to constructive feedback.
Try to ask your students to evaluate something simple and short. They may create an introduction to an essay. Do peer review sessions in a classroom whenever possible rather than assigning it as their homework. This will help assist students every time they may have some questions or any issue at hand.
Never ask them to review and have feedback on many things at once. Break it down into smaller, manageable things to deal with.
Student comments need to be actionable. Comments should answer questions on how feedback works and how to improve it. They should be clear to become effective.
Never wait until the end of the project or assignment before getting peer evaluations. Students tend to become busy after school with their respective sports and/or jobs. They need more time for edits. Multiple types of feedback help lessen their frustration and save time. You have to plan ahead and establish a class time to do the edit than set them as assignments or homework.
Provide students with methods for anonymous feedback so they become honest in giving out their critique. These methods could include gallery walks, paper numbering, or sticky notes. You are giving them the opportunity to give negative comments too. Think ahead of student expectations before performing this activity.
Track down the offender whenever any problem will arise during the activity.
Experiential learning, where students are learning hands-on provides students with the best of both worlds from learning in the classroom while building professional skills (2). Examples of experiential learning can be internships or assisting with faculty research or trips abroad. Students value this process as they are constantly looking for skills that will translate into the real world, and reviewing work is an essential workplace skill. Combining hands-on learning with learning by teaching is a great way for students to further reflect on their learning experience for professional growth. Evaluating current research studies, work reports, or project plans is a perfect way for students to ask the right questions, develop communication skills, and gain new insights as they plan their post-grad aspirations.
Peer feedback should already be established in the college years for future use in corporations. The same is true in developing a corporate culture, peer feedback is critical at the workplace. Here are the reasons why:
When students are out there in the real life of employment, they will be receiving feedback from their managers. Peer feedback comes from different sources on different aspects of work. Solid feedback from peers helps employees realize which area of performance needs improvement.
Receiving peer feedback helps workers better understand each other’s weaknesses and strengths. Employees work together to improve team productivity.
Employee engagement is critical in HR and peer feedback helps employees develop engaging work culture. Peers are comfortable when they are around their peers and enable them to observe their teammates’ performance. Communication is also effective here.
Feedback from peers enables employees to better understand their work and that of their peers. This leads them to find ways in utilizing their peers’ skills and become productive as a team. Peer feedback allows them to effectively communicate their ideas and suggestions. It opens an opportunity to evaluate themselves and establish themselves with feedback from different sources.
The feedback seems more informal from peers. It can be used in improving their performance at work. This gives employees comfort with each other without allowing fear.
Indeed, peer feedback is significant not just in a higher education classroom but also beyond that. The feedback is important in developing their skills for a career in the future. This is very significant for students to receive while at school for academic and professional development.
Rubric-based assessments are great for a variety of reasons:
However, building them from scratch can feel like a very daunting task. But we're here to help! In this blog, we've outlined the main things you should consider when rubric-making. Let's dive in!
Depending on your curriculum goals and different criteria using rubrics are a great tool when subjective student performance is the focus of the learning outcome [1]. Subjecting reading, analysis and writing assignments are perfect for rubric-based assessments to ascertain levels of achievement and provide specific feedback.
If an activity has an objectively correct answer, rubrics can also be used where responses can be evaluated on performance quality, problem solving skills, thought-process in addition to correctness.
Rubrics are a powerful peer review assessment tool, as they provide a structure for how students make observations. When evaluation feedback is based on rubric criteria, it reduces performance-based judgments [1]. It prevents students from learning through teaching when judgments are biased or have no reasoning [1]. This ultimately leads to less concerns or disputes from students on their own grades, as expectations are clearly communicated throughout the whole process.
The two most common types of rubric assessments are analytical rubrics, where each criterion / dimension trait is assessed separately or holistic rubrics, where different criteria are assessed simultaneously. Below is a more detailed explanation on the two types of rubrics.
The best courses for analytical rubrics are geared towards STEM education. By focusing on each criterion, instructions are clearly defined one at a time and it is easier for students to assess from. Analytical rubric assessment is a great way to gauge where improvement is needed for future years in order to track student progress [1].
Holistic rubrics have traditionally been used for activities relating to English composition. We've seen the SAT scoring the portion of the essay on a holistic rubric, making grading a subjective written activity fair and efficient. Holistic rubrics for peer review help students make global judgments on how they themselves produce work [1].
A single score works best for holistic based rubrics to determine a general impression of a student's performance on a particular task and overall score [2]. It may not, however, provide specific areas of strengths and weaknesses to gauge where improvement is required. A holistic rating scale can be very applicable for projects which will vary greatly like independent study projects or in large quantities [2].
Components of Holistic Rating Scales
Analytic rating scales provide performance expectation for multiple criteria, having a rating scale with descriptions is necessary for students to understand the difference between one rating and another [1].
Components of Analytic Rating Scales [2]
Be specific in the description of the knowledge or skills that you are looking for while limiting the most important characteristics. Keep the description relatively the same across each criterion but add adjectives or adverbial phrases to display a qualitative difference [1]. Including numbers, requirements should be associated with a qualitative reference that ensures that the quantity quality is not ignored by students (e.g. three relevant and relevant examples) [1].
To make our professors' lives easier, we've developed a large repository of customizable rubrics that can be used to create activities and conduct online peer review on Kritik. The created or edited rubrics can also be saved and added to the rubric library for future use.
Effective automated grading software must have clear grading standards defined, specified solutions stated and accurate results. Traditional grading systems encompass simple software to assess True/False or MCQ, however this is not feasible for short answer or written assignments where one must assess a students' deep understanding of course concepts.
According to MacLean's News outlet, University professors work an average of 48 hours a week completing both teaching and non-teaching duties. From that 48 hours, 22 hours a week is spent teaching, grading, conducting research and dealing with administration and course preparations.
Educators' dedication and efforts are widely appreciated and can be seen through how they conduct their courses. As many classrooms are being pushed to incorporate educational technology for remote teaching, why can't the same be applied for automated grading systems? We understand automated online grading software can most certainly free up more teaching time for professors, however, will it come at the cost of sacrificing fair grades for more biased or inaccurate grades?
To solve these challenges, Kritik is excited to announce our new calibration feature. This powerful tool is built to automatically keep our online grading software more precise while raising awareness among students regarding grading expectations for assignments and activities.
If you have already implemented Kritik as your e-learning platform, rolling out the calibration feature will be very easy. Currently, Kritik's grading system revolves around peer grading, where students anonymously evaluate their peer's submissions through rubric-based assessments. Now with calibrated peer review, students who grade closely to the professors preferences will have a higher impact when making evaluations on ****other submissions.
A professor will select, review and evaluate three creations of a previously finalized Kritik activity. Students will then evaluate the same three creations and have their evaluations provided for those same creations compared with the evaluations provided by the professor.
Students who have marked in line with how the professor did will get a higher grading score for the calibration activity. The higher the grading score the student achieves, the greater the impact they will have on future activities when assessing other students ' creations.
The aim is to identify strong peer evaluators who will prove to be effective for peer grading. Students who mark closely or exactly in line with the professor will demonstrate how strong their grading skills really are. In return, those very students will be rewarded with a higher grading score. Likewise, students who marked poorly or with little effort will be penalized with a lower grading score.
The creation score is an overall weighted average of the evaluations that a student received on their submission. In this case, the weight is the peer evaluators grading score. Students who ranked grading points from the calibration activity will have a higher weight as they evaluate their peer submissions. This can be proven valuable for essay marking, lab marking and etc.
You are guaranteed less inflated grades through calibrated peer review. Administering a calibration activity 1-2 times over the whole term is more than enough.
Students who grade closely to you indicate how well they are absorbing the context of the assignment requirements and rubric criteria. You can count on these students alike to the TA's to provide effective assessments and feedback that will further support their peers in the course.
To keep students motivated as they complete assignments, the "Grade Power' gamification system allows students to keep track of their improvement throughout the term. Obtaining a high grading score showcases how well students are comprehending and applying course content.
With the calibration feature in use, you can spend less time revising the grades of the students and spending more time creating Kritik assignments. With at least 6-7 Kritik activities by the end of the term, you can expect to see an exponential increase in the student's Evaluation score.
