A systematic literature review on the social nature of peer assessment

Peer assessment, the fact the students with the same status assess each other, seems to be an effective way to enhance student learning. It is also, by nature, a social activity and this social aspect can impact students’ learning and well-being. Up to present, two systematic literature review have been carried out on the subject: one by van Gennip et al. (2009) and one by Panadero (2016). Given that research on the social nature of peer assessment has flourished in recent years, an update is timely. Our aims are: (a) to investigate what researchers mean by “the social nature of peer assessment”, (b) to review how peer assessment activities are impacted by their social nature and (c) to investigate how can we decrease the potential undesirable effects of the social nature of peer assessment activities. A literature search was carried out using Scopus, PsycINFO and ERIC. We include a wide selection of search terms. The first part was composed of keywords related to peer assessment. The second part was composed of keywords linked to educational contexts. We set out to include studies conducted in primary, secondary and higher education. The third part was composed of keywords related to the social nature of peer assessment (e.g. emotion, interpersonal, “psychological safety”, friendship, trust, anonymity, relation, social…). The database search returned 13.847 results (without duplicates). The selection of the sample is ongoing. In a first step, titles and abstracts were screened for relevance, which resulted in a selection of 433 references