Institute for Teaching and Learning Innovation

Peer assessment using a digital tool

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  2. Teaching guidance
  3. Assessment
  4. Assessing teams and groups

Peer assessments are a valuable tool to use with student groupwork to encourage students to reflect on and critically evaluate not just their own learning and skill development, but those of their team members as well in preparation for their professional careers. 

  1. Introduction
  2. Process and product
  3. Peer questions
  4. Group questions
  1. Open-ended questions
  2. Formative and summative assessments
  3. Dysfunction in groups
  4. References and further reading

5. Open-ended questions

Open- ended questions require each student to provide a written response to questions you pose about their contribution, the group or the project in general. They give students the opportunity to add more to their response than they can with either Scale or Points division questions, encouraging them to think more deeply about the assessment so they can qualify the scores they have given for each metric. 

N.B. Review the information provided in the section above on Adding comments to justify peer scores before considering whether to include Open-ended questions.

Number of questions

While some evaluation instruments use a combination of Scale, Points division and Open-ended questions, be wary of making the evaluation too long and complex as students may be less likely to invest their time in completing it accurately, and it can make your analysis of the evaluation more cumbersome. Consider the weighting of the assessment task, how often you will ask students to complete peer assessment and the level of experience of the students in group work.

While there is no correct number of questions to include in the peer assessment, somewhere between four and seven questions is probably enough for your peer assessment.