Rethinking assessment: Why peer feedback matters more than ever

Written by Julian Hopkins

With the rapid rise of generative AI and growing student cohorts, universities are under pressure to rethink traditional assessment practices. How can we ensure that assessments remain meaningful, equitable, and aligned with the skills graduates truly need? This blog post explores the increasing value of peer assessment as a scalable, authentic approach to enhancing student engagement and supporting the development of graduate attributes across disciplines.

Rationale for change

Responding to these challenges requires us to reconsider not just how we assess, but why. Simon’s important reminder that, “Learning results… only from what the student does and thinks” (in Ambrose et al., 2010: 1; emphasis added) should be at the centre of the shift towards active, student-centred learning, where the focus moves from assessment as a final product, towards “assessment for/as learning” (Stančić, 2021: 852, original emphasis). This also aligns with the increased focus on authentic assessment: tasks that mirror professional practice and develop transferrable skills. These authentic assessments help learners develop graduate attributes such as time management, collaboration, and communication. In other words, redesigning assessment means that students can use and understand assessment as a means to self-improvement, rather than a tick box exercise to obtain a certificate.

Why peer assessment matters

One approach that aligns strongly with these aims and offers both pedagogical and practical benefits is peer assessment.

Peer assessment involves students giving structured feedback on each other’s work using defined criteria, often with the aim of enhancing learning, reflection, and collaboration. The literature offers strong evidence that peer assessment enhances meaningful assessment and supports the development of graduate attributes (e.g. Serrano-Aguilera et al., 2021: 2).

Through peer assessment, students improve their subject knowledge by reviewing their peers’ responses to the same tasks, preparing and giving feedback, and reflecting on the feedback they receive (Reddy et al., 2021). Students also communicate more effectively with their peers, helping to build a community of practice (Reddy et al., 2021: 825, 833).

To better understand the varied practices that fall under peer assessment, it is useful to distinguish between its different forms and purposes. Helden et al.’s typology (2023: 22953) groups three types of peer-based assessment activity under the umbrella term of peer assessment:

Challenges to effective peer assessment

There are potential cognitive, affective and behavioural challenges to effective teamwork and peer assessment (Sridharan et al., 2023).

• Cognitively, students need guidance, practice and carefully planned preparation so that they can provide and benefit from peer feedback.
• Affectively, students need a safe space to express and receive feedback without fear of judgement, and need to trust that the process will be fair.
• The behavioural impediments relate to students seeking to maximise their grades, exercising preference for friends, and/or engaging in strategies to maximise grades at the expense of giving reliable feedback.

Formative vs summative approaches

Formative exercises carry less risk and therefore less potential student dissatisfaction based on having to ‘do the lecturer’s work’, distrust in other students’ capacity for accurate and unbiased evaluations, and strategies aimed at maximising grades regardless of quality (Amendola and Miceli, 2018; Helden et al., 2023; Stančić, 2021).

Summative exercises have the potential to reduce instructor workload, and there is evidence that, given sufficient training, students can grade work in a reliable and accurate manner (e.g. Serrano-Aguilera et al., 2021: 18).

Strategies for success

Nonetheless, student concerns about the fairness and accuracy of peer feedback are important, and can be managed by following some good practices:

• using at least three peer reviewers to identify outliers (Amendola and Miceli, 2018)
• providing clear rubrics and training on how to give constructive feedback (Wanner and Palmer, 2018)
• starting with formative exercises to build trust and familiarity (Reddy et al., 2021)
• communicating the purpose and process of peer assessment clearly and consistently.

Embedding peer assessment in the curriculum

The key to successful peer assessment depends on careful planning and integration across the curriculum. Peer assessment quality improves with practice, so it should be introduced as soon as possible, gradually scaling-up expectations as students progress.

A typical model for a social sciences or humanities programme could develop as follows:

Where group projects are included, there would be formative peer evaluations for the first two years, and a summative evaluation in the final year that adjusts the final grade of the individual students in the project group.

This approach helps students gradually build confidence and competence in peer assessment, moving from qualitative to quantitative feedback and from formative to summative contexts.

Choosing a platform

To support this structured approach, selecting the right peer assessment platform is crucial for ensuring consistency, scalability, and a positive student experience.

A variety of platforms now support efficient feedback workflows, anonymity, and instructor oversight; key features for successful peer assessment. The table below outlines some of those currently available including their compatibility with Moodle.

Choosing a peer assessment platform: Overview of tools

Conclusions and next steps

Peer assessment not only complements educators’ feedback, but also supports authentic assessment, criteria-based evaluation, development of graduate attributes, and preparation for the workplace. With effective tools readily available, the main challenge is thoughtful, curriculum-wide implementation to ensure relevance and impact for today’s students.

As higher education continues to evolve, strategically embedding peer assessment can play a vital role in shaping more engaged, reflective, and capable graduates.

References

Ambrose SA, Bridges MW, DiPietro M, et al. (2010) How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching. Newark, UNITED STATES: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated.

Amendola D and Miceli C (2018) Online Peer Assessment to Improve Students’ Learning Outcomes and Soft Skills. Italian Journal of Educational Technology 26(3). 3: 71–84.

Helden GV, Van Der Werf V, Saunders-Smits GN, et al. (2023) The Use of Digital Peer Assessment in Higher Education—An Umbrella Review of Literature. IEEE Access 11: 22948–22960.

Reddy K, Harland T, Wass R, et al. (2021) Student peer review as a process of knowledge creation through dialogue. Higher Education Research & Development 40(4). Routledge: 825–837.

Serrano-Aguilera JJ, Tocino A, Fortes S, et al. (2021) Using Peer Review for Student Performance Enhancement: Experiences in a Multidisciplinary Higher Education Setting. Education Sciences 11(2). 2. Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute: 71.

Sridharan B, McKay J and Boud D (2023) The Four Pillars of Peer Assessment for Collaborative Teamwork in Higher Education. In: Noroozi O and De Wever B (eds) The Power of Peer Learning: Fostering Students’ Learning Processes and Outcomes. Social Interaction in Learning and Development. Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29411-2_1

Stančić M (2021) Peer assessment as a learning and self-assessment tool: a look inside the black box. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 46(6). Routledge: 852–864.Wanner T and Palmer E (2018) Formative self-and peer assessment for improved student learning: the crucial factors of design, teacher participation and feedback. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 43(7). Routledge: 1032–104