July 25, 2023, by Ben Atkinson

Moodle 4.1: Introducing the Peer Assessment Activity

As part of the 2023 upgrade to Moodle 4.1, a new activity will be introduced which allows academics to run peer assessment tasks in their Moodle module. The new activity is called Peer Assessment. 

The Peer Assessment activity is essentially a group assignment submission combined with peer grading, allowing students to assess each other for their contribution to a group project or for their performance in a group task. They can also, if the function is enabled, assess themselves and their own contribution to the project or task. 

The Peer Assessment activity can be added in the usual way from within the ‘Add an Activity’ menu inside your Moodle site. It creates a group assessment, where the students can submit their peer assessment comments, scores and any associated files. 

The peer assessment task asks each student to assess each of their peers against three or more written criteria. You can also enable additional settings, such as asking your students to write comments and justification against each criteria, to support the grades they have given. 

Each written criteria translates to a number during the calculation which provides the student’s overall grade for the Peer Assessment activity. These grades are shared the Gradebook and you can review the students peer assessment scores before making them available to the students. This provides the opportunity to check for outliers in the task, and to view the justification feedback. 

The Peer Assessment activity has a number of default settings. These settings can be changed as required. 

Further support with using the Peer Assessment Activity

Learning Technology have produced the following helpsheets, available on workspace, to support you with using the new Peer Assessment Activity within Moodle 4.1.

Staff Guide to Using the Peer Assessment Activity

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