January 27, 2025, by Ben Atkinson

Running Peer Assessment Tasks in Moodle

As we head towards the start of the next semester, it is timely at this halfway point in the academic year to consider the ways in which Moodle can support the delivery of non-standard assessments (that is not your usual Moodle dropbox or Turnitin assignment). In this second post, we discuss one example, that of the peer assessment activity which was introduced in the 23/24 academic year.

The Peer Assessment activity allows you run a traditional peer assessment activity within your Moodle site. This automates many of the processes that you might usually do in person with feedback forms or excel spreadsheets, later uploading the final grade to the gradebook on your Moodle site.

You might be familiar with the WebPA tool. This is a stand alone platform for delivering Peer Assessment tasks with students. While we do not have WebPA at Nottingham, the Peer Assessment activity on Moodle replicates the features of WebPA within your Moodle site. It allows you run a peer assessment task with students where groups upload their final project (one upload per group) and students then provide peer feedback against each member of their group based on the parameters that you set up. You can choose the type of scale used for the activity, and whether or not students need to provide a justification for their scores. Finally, you can decide if students should mark their own contribution to the project, or just the contribution of their peers.

When the Peer Assessment activity launched, we published a blog post outlining the various features of the tool in more detail. There is also a workspace page which details how to set up the activity.

There has been a lot of interest in the Peer Assessment activity within Moodle and we’ve been collecting feedback from colleagues who have been running this kind of assessment with their students. Feedback has show that in some cases there might be a misunderstanding of how the activity works and what kind of peer assessment task it is capable of delivering. For example, the activity cannot deliver a peer assessment task that is worth 100% of the grade. There is a pre-requisite (in the WebPA model) that you ask students to upload their group project, and then the algorithm in the Peer Assessment activity, takes the various peer assessment scores and rationalises them to an average which takes account of any outlier scores provided by students (such as someone giving their peers full marks for every question). This WebPA score is then used to uplift or downgrade the overall group mark for individual students. You can limit to what extent the peer assessment mark impacts the original grade. If you have provided a mark of 60 for the group, you can then say 20% of the grade should be affected by the peer assessment element. So in this scenario, all students in a group would get a mark of 60 for 80% of the assessment and the remaining 20% would be uplifted or downgraded based on peer assessment scores. This would result in some students getting higher than 60 for the overall group projects and others getting less than 60, depending on the feedback they receive from their peers.

Finally, we have received a number of questions asking us to outline in detail how the algorithm calculates the peer assessment score and applies this to the group mark. We have created a workspace page which details how the peer assessment algorithm works and have manually calculated the same scores to compare against the activity. In both cases our final grades were the same, which confirms that the the algorithm is working correctly.

You can find out more about the Peer Assessment activity on the relevant workspace pages, or if you wish to use the activity in your module you can contact your Faculty Learning Technology Consultant who would be happy to support the delivery of this type of assessment.

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