The Impact of Peer Assessment on Academic Performance: A Meta-Analysis of Intervention Studies

• In Event: Peer Assessment Effects on Student Learning Outcomes With a Focus on Higher Education

Abstract

Objectives
Peer assessment has been the subject of considerable research interest over the last three decades, with numerous educational researchers advocating for the integration of peer assessment into schools and instructional practice. Despite this advocacy, research synthesis in this area has largely relied on narrative reviews to evaluate the efficacy of peer assessment. We performed a meta-analysis that evaluates the effect of peer assessment on academic performance when compared to no assessment as well as teacher assessment. This meta-analysis evaluates intervention studies that utilise experimental or quasi-experimental designs.
Theoretical Frameworks
Theoretical frameworks of peer assessment propose that it allows students to critically engage with the assessed material, to compare and contrast performance with their peers, and identify gaps or errors in their own knowledge (Topping, 1998). In addition, peer assessment may improve the communication of feedback, as peers may use similar and more accessible language (Liu, Lu, Wu, & Tsai, 2016). However, the efficacy of peer assessment is likely to be contingent on a range of factors including characteristics of the learning environment, the student, and the assessment itself (Kluger & DeNisi, 1996; Ossenberg, Henderson & Mitchell, 2018).
Data Sources
A literature search was carried out using PsycInfo, Google Scholar and ERIC. The database search returned 4,072 records. Ultimately, 55 articles with 137 effect sizes of experimental and quasi-experimental studies that evaluated the effect of peer assessment were identified.
Results and Conclusions
The results suggest that peer assessment improves academic performance compared with no assessment (g = 0.54, p < .001), and was not significantly different in its effect from either teacher assessment (g = 0.20, p = .059) or self-assessment (g = 0.22, p = .238). Additionally, meta-regressions suggested that the effectiveness of peer assessment was remarkably robust across a wide range of contexts.
The current findings cannot adequately distinguish between the effect of assessing vs being an assessee because most of the included studies confound giving and receiving peer assessment, and therefore no substantive conclusions can be drawn about whether the benefits of peer assessment extend from giving feedback, receiving feedback, or both. Furthermore, the studies included in this meta-analysis were not only predominantly randomly allocated at the classroom level (i.e., quasi-experiments) and were not analysed using appropriate techniques for analysing clustered data (e.g., multi-level modelling). This is problematic because it makes disentangling classroom-level effects (e.g. teacher quality) from the intervention effect difficult, which may lead to biased statistical inferences (Hox, 1998).
Significance
The results provide evidence that there is a positive effect of peer assessment on academic performance in primary, secondary, and tertiary students. However, feedback characteristics deemed important by current theories of peer assessment may not be as significant as first thought, as we find little evidence they moderate the effect of peer assessment. Furthermore, the included studies suffer from a number of important methodical limitations which may undermine the meta-analytic estimates

Authors

• Kit Spenser Double, University of Oxford

• Joshua Aaron McGrane, University of Oxford

• Therese N. Hopfenbeck, University of Oxford