The Pedagogical Anatomy of Peer-Assessment: Dissecting a peerScholar Assignment

Peer-assessment is a process wherein students grade the work of their peers rather than relying on an expert. With the recent advent of online tools for peer-assessment [1] it is possible to utilize peer-assessment within any course context, even extremely large courses, with virtually no logistic or economic barriers. Given this potential for widespread use, the present paper highlights the pedagogical value of peer-assessment by breaking down a specific assignment and highlighting the manner in which the learning experienced by students maps onto prominent categorizations of strong pedagogy. We argue that peer-assessment provides a powerful compliment to multiple-choice testing by providing support for the sort of deep, critical and creative learning that is simply not possible to either encourage or assess via multiple- choice.