Impact of Peer Evaluation Confidentiality on Student Marks

Authors

Christina Hamme Peterson, Rider UniversityFollow
N.Andrew Peterson, Rutgers, The State University of New JerseyFollow

Abstract

Although group work is commonly used in university-level instruction, social loafing, domineering team members, poor attenders, and inequitable distribution of marks have been identified as obstacles to team-based learning. Peer evaluation has been proposed as one vehicle to address these issues. For use in grading, peer evaluations are often anonymous; however, as tools to address team functioning, they should not be conducted anonymously, but rather with the results discussed as feedback. It has been suggested, however, that non-confidential peer evaluations will artificially elevate students’ marks. In this study, we investigated the impact of peer evaluation confidentiality on students’ marks. Without a weighted correction, confidential evaluations significantly dropped students’ marks while non-confidential evaluations raised them. Implications for practice are discussed.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Recommended Citation

Peterson, Christina Hamme and Peterson, N.Andrew (2011) "Impact of Peer Evaluation Confidentiality on Student Marks," International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Vol. 5: No. 2, Article 13.
Available at: https://doi.org/10.20429/ijsotl.2011.050213