An exploratory study into graduate students' attitudes towards peer assessment

In recent decades, many researchers have been working on the effectiveness of peer assessment in higher education. Being a useful teaching tool, peer assessment enables students to actively participate in learning and create a student-centered learning environment. Many studies focused on the influence of peer assessment on student learning, however, few studies have explored indicators that teachers can use to identify potential problems regarding students’ attitudes towards students’ feedback and peer review process. Thus, this is an exploratory study, trying to understand indicators for success and problems regarding students’ peer feedback process. We had 93 international students performing three peer-feedback assignments (each assignment of around 2000 words and each review of at least 250 words) on the topics of digital transformation, design thinking, and leadership in an Innovation and Entrepreneurship Basic course. For each of the tasks, students completed questionnaires about their attitudes towards peer assessment in general, providing peer assessment and the usefulness of the received peer assessment. We investigate the correlation between students’ performance, students’ assignment lengths, and students’ reviews lengths and attitude questionnaire items and we present the correlations we observed. These correlations can serve as first indicators to teachers to detect potential problems with peer assessment and get insights into student’s perceptions of the peer assessment process.