18 Peer Evaluation

Peer evaluation is an integral part of TBL. Not only does it serve to ensure accountability, more importantly it helps to grow and foster functional team dynamics. However, it must be undertaken and facilitated with care. Prior to asking students to conduct peer assessment, it is vital that students are taught how to give and receive constructive criticism as feedback. They also must have specific guidelines and criteria on which to base their feedback. The feedback process must be moderated by the instructor to ensure that it is appropriate and accurate (Sibley & Ostafichuck, 2015; Topping, 2018).

There are many ways to facilitate and moderate peer feedback. Many of the analog and digital versions still require the instructor to compile and distribute the feedback.

This section will describe how to use a Moodle workshop for team and peer evaluation. A Moodle workshop is a tool designed to facilitate peer assessment. It occurs in phases that the instructor manages and progresses. The workshop is designed to allow students to submit an assignment and then be assigned 1 or more of the peers’ submissions to grade and provide feedback on. The workshop has the ability to provide two different grades for the overall activity: one for the submission itself and another for the assessment they provided of their peer’s submission.

In the case of team evaluation, the “submission” has generally happened in person and is each student’s conduct and contribution to their team. As well, you may or may not wish to evaluate and grade the feedback that students have provided for the teammates. However, this feedback does need to be moderated. You will probably want to facilitate multiple opportunities for students to give peer feedback. Peer feedback events that occur earlier on in the course will generally be subjective and formative with no grade attached, while the final event will likely be summative and have a grade attached. When managed by the instructor, a Moodle workshop activity will disseminate feedback to the individual students and populate grades assigned in the Moodle gradebook automatically.

A Moodle workshop progresses through 5 phases: set up phase, submission phase, assessment phase, evaluation phase and close. The steps to set up a workshop, moderate the feedback and progress the phases are described below.

Phase 1: Setup phase and editing the assessment form

Phase 2: Submission phase and allocation

Phase 3: Assessment phase (Peer evaluation)

Phase 4: Evaluation phase (Instructor moderation and grade calculation)

Phase 5: Close