Peer Assessment

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). 

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. However, 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

"What if we changed these ‘disposable assignments’ into activities which actually added value to the world? Then students and faculty might feel different about the time and effort they invested in them" (Wiley, 2013)

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.

Cost of Education: How Kritik adds more value for less

Peer assessment is a powerful tool instructors can utilize to help students learn, analyze, and engage more deeply in their understanding of course content.

6 ways peer assessment can enhance student learning online

Kritik’s platform is free for community colleges; learn how peer assessment can benefit community college students today.

Learn how Kritik can be used alongside your LMS this semester to provide an enhanced learning experience for students.

Learn tips on how to reduce the prevalence of cheating for your online exams.

These are the soft skills college students need to develop in order to thrive in the workforce.

Learn how to use Curation Activities to help students develop Higher-Order Thinking skills.

See how calibrated peer review can save professors grading time while ensuring students receive optimal feedback on assignments.

Learn what you need to do to maximize the results of your peer evaluations

Critical and motivational feedback feedback increases productivity, overall knowledge retention and more quality in students work.

Building a rubric from scratch can seem like a very daunting task. Rubric-based assessments are a useful tool for a variety of reasons:

There is no secret formula that will improve academic achievement for students. If it had been there it would definitely differ by faculty. The purpose of this article is to lay out theories which have actually worked; real studies that are directly achieving results.

Cumulative assignments can be transformed into smaller segments of peer evaluation that will ultimately help your students produce a higher quality final assignment.