How to Use the Peer Assessment Activity

This refers to Moodle 4.3 from August 2024 onwards

The Peer Assessment activity is essentially a group assignment submission combined with peer grading, allowing students to assess each other for their contribution to a group project or for their performance in a group task. They can also, if the function is enabled, assess themselves and their own contribution to the project or task. The Peer Assessment activity essentially allows the functionality of Web-PA (another peer assessment tool) inside Moodle and it works in the same way.

The Peer Assessment activity can be added in the usual way from within the ‘Add an Activity’ menu inside your Moodle site. It creates a group assessment, where the students submit a group project (essay, artefact, project files etc.) and can then submit their peer assessment comments, scores and any associated files. The peer assessment task asks each student to assess each of their peers against three or more written criteria. You can also enable additional settings, such as asking your students to write comments and justification against each criteria, to support the grades they have given. 

Each written criteria translates to a number during the calculation which provides the student's overall grade for the Peer Assessment activity. You provide a tutor grade for the group project and can decide how much of that grade is affected by the peer assessment task (either uplifted or reduced based on the peer assessment mark). You can find out more about the algorithm that works out the peer assessment grade and view a worked example. These grades are shared the Gradebook and you can review the students peer assessment scores before making them available to the students. This provides the opportunity to check for outliers in the task, and to view the justification feedback. 

The Peer Assessment activity has a number of default settings. These settings can be changed as required. 

Important Note – Groups Set Up 

Before deciding to use the Peer Assessment activity, you must ensure that you have your groups set up in Moodle and that they are ready to be attached to the activity. 

If students are in more than one group on a module, this must be reflected in the group set up before creating the Peer Assessment activity. 

Creating Your Peer Assessment Activity 

The following steps outline how to create a Peer Assessment activity within Moodle 4.1. 

1. Navigate to your Moodle Module Site and locate the section where you would like to add your Peer Assessment activity.
   
   
   
   
2. Ensure that ‘Edit Mode’ is turned on using the toggle switch on the top menu
   
   
   
   
3. Click ‘Add an activity or resource’
   
   
   
   
4. Search for ‘Peer Assessment’
   
   
   
   
5. Click the ‘Peer Assessment’ activity to add this to your module. Note: You must have groups set up on your module before you add the Peer Assessment activity
   
   
6. On the main editing page, provide a title and description for your activity. Choose if you would like to show this description to students.
   
   
   
   
7.  Open the ‘Peer assessment settings’ section and set your parameters for due date etc. 
   
   

Things to note: 

• At least one student must upload a file to the Peer Assessment activity in order for it to be marked. Once a student has uploaded a file, this will appear to all students in the group. You can change the number of files to be uploaded, if you require students to upload multiple documentation for their project. 
• ‘Allow students to self-grade along with peers’ gives the option for students to mark their own contribution to the group project as well as the contribution of their peers. You can enable this setting if you wish to give students this opportunity. 

Additional Settings

1. Open ‘Calculator settings’ and choose the Peer Assessment weighting. We recommend that this be set to 100%, as you can weigh the overall assessment against others in the module within the gradebook.
   
   
   
   
2. Open ‘Assessment criteria settings’ and choose your criteria for the Peer Assessment task.
   
   
   1. By default, each Peer Assessment task is created with three criteria, and you must provide a description for each.
      
      
      
      
   2. You should also choose ‘Like’ scale for each criteria and keep this choice the same for all your criteria. The ‘Like’ scale is the way in which students will rank their fellow group members. We recommend the ‘Peer Assessment’ choice from the dropdown menu, which is a standard Likert scale. But you can choose another type of scale, such as a star rating.
      
      
   3. You can add more criteria by clicking the ‘Add one more criteria’ button at the bottom of the list.
      
      
      
      
3. At the top of your criteria list you can choose whether you want students to justify their reasons for each choice.
   
   
   1. In the justification menu you have several options:
      
      
      1. Hidden from students – Students will not see their peer feedback.
      2. Visible anonymous – Students will see their peer feedback but it will be anonymous.
      3. Visible with usernames – Students will see their peer feedback and it will include student names against each feedback comment.
         
         

   2. You can also set a character limit for how much text you wish to allow students to write for their justification.
      
      

   3. Finally, you can choose justification per peer (for the whole submission) or per criteria (justify every group member for each criteria marked).
      
      
      
      

4. Choose ‘Save and display’ to view the Peer Assessment activity