Peer assessment and feedback activities give students opportunities to:
Internalise the criteria: Assessing someone else's work means understanding and applying the grading criteria, so in the process of peer assessment students get a better understanding of the standard expected of their own work. The more peer assessment they do, the better that understanding will become and they will be better able to evaluate their own work.
Learn from examples: Seeing examples of how other people have tackled a task can provide valuable feedback on one's own attempts. Students may pick up tips for how to structure a piece of work, or see some of the pitfalls to avoid. Again, the wider the range of examples reviewed, the more that can be learnt.
Receive Feedback: The feedback that students give each other is likely to be different from tutor feedback. Although both should be related to the criteria, students are likely to write their feedback in a different way and may have a clearer understanding of what is really useful at that stage of the process.
