Peer assessment of assignments – the USQ experience

Abstract: High quality and timely feedback on assignments is considered imperative in the learning process. Providing feedback on an assignment requires considerable time and effort on the academic’s part. Yet, the effectiveness of feedback depends largely on the student’s decision to both absorb and apply it. In fact, anecdotal evidence suggests that most students give insufficient attention to reviewing assessment feedback irrespective of its quality, quantity, and/or timeliness. This suggests the feedback mechanism of assessment items has questionable effectiveness in student learning. Peer assessment of assignments is one system that could potentially improve the learning effectiveness for students. In this system, each student is required, as part of assessment, to review and comment on peer’s assignments. This system has been trialled at USQ in a 2009 course with a large distance student cohort. Here the authors describe the steps involved in peer assessment, summarise the work in progress, and discuss preliminary results. The authors also highlight the importance of the peer assessment system in improving students ’ learning at an institution with a large distance student cohort. This paper reports only the initial part of the study since final results were not to hand at the time of the preparation of this paper