Liesje Coertjens: (Peers) Assessing and fostering learning in Higher Education

Higher education increasingly focuses on skills and competences, to prepare students for life-long learning. To assess these skills and competences, performance assessment has been recommended: students are asked to create an product (write an essay, give a presentation,...). As students have some liberty in creating these products, there is often substantial and unexpected diversity in these products.

Consequently, assessing these products is far from easy. Rubrics are created to support the raters, but they often do not annul the differences between the raters. We will look at some lesser known ways to support raters, and highlight how they could be useful for research in Higher Education as well.

In addition, recent literature shows that peer assessment of these products is very beneficial for learning. However, peer assessment also presents a number of challenges. For example, due to lack of confidence in their ability to provide feedback, students may refrain from formulating suggestions. Or, students may struggle to use the feedback of their peers. We will zoom in on these challenges and present some suggestions to overcome them.