Abstract:

Present-day ideas of formative assessment outline interactive and reciprocal processes of co-regulation of learning from multiple sources. These processes should include interactions between students and teachers as well as between peers. In higher education, a wide range of design strategies, practices, instruments and technological tools have been used, and recent studies focus on how peer assessment can be incorporated into comprehensive learning environments.

This document presents a systematic review of the peer assessment landscape in higher education by analysing articles published between 2018 and 2022 in main publication databases. The following keyword combinations were used: peer assessment OR peer feedback OR peer evaluation OR peer grading in the Title, AND higher education OR university in the Abstract. After a first analysis of the content of the studies returned in the search results, all studies that did not discuss any aspect of peer assessment in detail, that were not carried out in a higher education context or that involved the assessment of professional practice rather than academic experiences and processes were excluded from the analysis. Following these established criteria, a total of 397 articles were collected and analysed. The main aim of this review was to describe the recent panorama of peer evaluation in higher education, identifying the most common practices as well as the subject areas where these practices have been most utilised.

Results show that the majority of published studies are related to describing and analysing practices (86%), with the remainder being surveys, methodological analyses or theoretical reviews on the subject. In terms of classroom practices, the use of peer assessment predominates in language subjects (39 per cent), especially in foreign language teaching, followed by STEM subjects (14 per cent), health sciences subjects (13 per cent), management and business subjects (7 per cent) and teacher training areas (7 per cent). The analysis carried out shows that the most common implementation of peer assessment in higher education involves students using pre-defined criteria to assess their peers, awarding marks and/or providing written feedback. In addition, many studies highlight the fact that peer assessment can be a tool for improving student learning and have analysed the impact of these practices. These results make it possible to characterise and point out the most common scenarios of empirical research in peer assessment, providing a summary of the main directions of research in this field and identifying those that need further investment.

Keywords:

Assessment for learning; peer assessment; higher education; systematic review.