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Incorporating Peer Evaluation into Your Course

Originally published January 23, 2026

Peer evaluation is an assessment approach that involves students in the learning process in active and impactful ways. Students assess each other’s work using specified criteria and provide developmental feedback, furthering their classmate’s cognition of course content and deepening their own understanding of the course materials and the quality of their work.

Providing opportunities for students to evaluate their peers’ work supports higher order cognitive skills, such as critical and creative thinking, as well as mastery of course content and achievement of learning outcomes (Yang et al. 2025; Nicol & Breslin 2013; Zhan et al. 2023). When engaging in peer-to-peer evaluation, students are provided with additional and alternative evaluative points of view, allowing them to see the differences in their own work and that of their peers, and are empowered with agency and accountability for promoting learning success in group work (Pond & ul-Haq 1997).

By lifting the curtain on evaluation processes and involving students, instructors are also supported with greater accuracy and shared effort in grading (Lynch & Schmid 2017). In this week’s Teaching Together, TEI offers strategies when considering how to incorporate peer evaluation into courses.

 

Strategies for Implementing Peer Evaluation 

As part of a scaffolded assessment

Create a peer evaluation component to scaffolded assessments where students can benefit from giving and receiving feedback. Emphasize the purpose of feedback along with requiring students to incorporate their peers’ feedback into subsequent submissions. Interacting with feedback supports students’ growth and skill development and can empower students to critically evaluate their peers’ work through a developmental process. 

As part of group work

Incorporate peer evaluation into group work or team-based projects either throughout, or at the end of the group project to engage with individual students’ progress and to hear about their experience with their group members (whether positive or with room for improvement) to support both accountability and the learning success of all group members. Group work helps to limit “social loafing” or limited productivity as team members are accountable for their own work, not just the final group product, which can lead to more intrinsic motivation in group work settings.

  • Discuss with students the importance of showing up for their peers as they would want their peers to show up for them and providing one another with constructive feedback, not with simply ‘great job.’

  • Remind students that they will see things that you will not, and that peer evaluation is a great way to empower your students to critically evaluate their peer’s work.

  • Consider what you might do if there is a group member that is not supporting the group’s work. What are the steps you can take during and after to ensure equity in the grading process? 

As audience members during presentations

Peer evaluations signal to the rest of the class that they need to be present and actively engaged by listening carefully and thinking critically about what is being presented. Including peer evaluations in this way can support the entire class in deeper learning opportunities. 

  • Remind your students that engaging authentically in peer evaluation helps instructors see nuances that they may have missed but that stick out to students in the audience. 

  • Instructors can also give the student audience an ‘authentic role’ in providing feedback, role-playing as government or industry leaders, academic reviewers, or members of the public.

For supporting writing development

Incorporating the peer review process can be a key component to successfully and authentically supporting writing as an iterative process. After students complete a draft of their written assignment, each student is assigned one (or more) of their peers’ drafts to provide feedback on using a rubric (keep reading for more on rubrics). 

  • In their final submission, students can be asked to identify and discuss how they addressed peer feedback. 

  • Instructors can share with students that peer review processes are a common practice for submissions to scholarly publications and that this course-based practice prepares them for giving, receiving, and responding to feedback in their chosen career. 

  • Students can also be asked to submit a reflection on what they have learned from the peer evaluation process. 


Supporting Authentic and Accurate Evaluation Practices

Instructors can determine whether they want their students to evaluate the process of working in groups or the product that the group submitted. For process-based evaluation, instructors provide the group with the key group work traits to be graded. For product-based evaluation, instructors align the evaluative items with the purpose of the assessment that, in turn, links back to course learning outcomes. Students should be provided with an appropriate rubric or feedback template that aligns with the success criteria of the assessment to support them in providing relevant feedback.

Students may be uncomfortable rating peers differently, even anonymously. Setting a rule requiring different scores for each student can help overcome this, and using a larger pool of points can make assigning points less stressful for students to distinguish between peers’ contributions (VIU 2026).

Effective Rubrics for Peer Evaluation

When asking students to engage in peer evaluation assessments, either for group work or to support other course activities and assessment, such as watching their classmates deliver presentations, create rubrics that are small, simple and have space for written comments. Consider:

 

 

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