Considerations

Won't students take each others' ideas? This is one reservation which is widely held by students. Richard Milne (UCL Centre for Virology) comments on his own experience of setting up peer review activities, "I wasn't worried about students stealing each others' ideas ... you discuss a subject with somebody else and then formulate your own way of thinking about it based on the conversation you’ve had". Students can be encouraged to credit each others' ideas (and a convention can be agreed for circumstances of anonymity).

Can students at any level of knowledge carry out good peer reviews? In their A meta-analysis comparing validity of tutor and student assessments, by Falchikov and Goldfinch (2009) could not find evidence found that peer assessment in higher level courses was any more reliable (between different assessors) or valid (according to a standard) than at introductory levels. They speculate that careful preparation by tutors and students can compensate for subject knowledge of students at earlier stages of their courseat introductory levels was as valid as at higher levels. They attribute this to good preparation.

Considerations

• Who decides the questions? Although these will be aligned to the assessment criteria and the intended learning outcomes of the course, m M ost of the work on peer assessment stresses the importance of involving how important it is to involve students in developing and clarifying the assessment criteria , - even if they arrive at similar criteria to the tutors . The purpose here is to increase (and of course the criteria are likely to be aligned to the module's intended learning outcomes). Involving students in this way increases a sense of ownership, reduce reduces anxiety, and also reach promotes a shared understanding about the meaning of the criteria which (Falchikov and Goldfinch, 2009) improves . As well as improving the reliability and validity - and with those, of the assessment, it also builds confidence in the process. Orsmond (2004, Section 2) discusses alternative techniques for introducing assessment criteria to students, including giving opportunities to practice in applying the criteria.
• What kinds of questions? Falchikov and Goldfinch (2009) found that asking students to make a global judgement (i.e. of the submission as a whole) based on distinct criteria was more effective than either a judgement without criteria, or separate judgements of separate dimensions of the submission. McConlogue (2014) points out that as well as value judgements, reviewed students will also expect feedback that makes suggestions about how to improve; PeerMark open questions allow tutors to prompt student reviewers for these suggestions.
  
• Order of questions. Topping (2009) recommends asking students to give positive feedback first, since this improves subsequent acceptance of negative feedback.
• Opportunities for practice. Again, there is a clear recommendation from the literature that students have the opportunity to rehearse working with the criteria. This could fit well with this is a clear recommendation from the literature, and could be incorporated into the aforementioned recommended discussion of the criteria.

Considerations.

Does it matter which students review which other students' work? Tutors may If tutors want students to connect students on the basis of interest. As well as matching students through PeerMark, another way to achieve this is to , there are alternative ways to do this. Tutors can manually pair individual students through PeerMark. Alternatively they can set up groups in your the Moodle area and apply these to the Turnitin assignment. AlternativelyOr thirdly, PeerMark has the option of letting students choose the work they review (note though that this introduces the possibility that some students will receive more feedback than others - usually which can be contentious).