How to support students with peer assessment and providing feedback

Sarah Ash, Subject Advisor for Health and Social Care

In this blog I will look at how you can help your Cambridge Nationals students give better feedback to each other and improve their evaluations in their Health and Social Care and Child Development assignments. 

Peer feedback, when students provide one another with feedback on their work or performance, is widely used in UK secondary schools across all subjects. When you engage your students in giving feedback to their peers using the relevant assessment criteria, this provides students with opportunities to explore these criteria and standards in the context of a specific task. 

Being able to give constructive feedback and evaluate is a transferable skill that can be taught and learnt at any age.

The value of peer assessment

Peer assessment is so much more than just marking each other’s work and saying “I enjoyed it”, or “Well done!” It can be constructive and informative. To be effective it should be undertaken in a way that enables each person to engage with the process and be able to reflect on the other students’ work. It should also mean that students are able to express clearly how the work can be improved. 

Paul Black, Dylan Wiliam and others at King’s College London make it very clear in their published research Inside the Black Box and Working inside the Black Box, that both peer and self assessment are valuable in promoting learning, but they believe that skills in peer assessment should be developed first. 

As well as helping your students to understand how assessors use assessment criteria to judge written evidence as part of a project, peer assessment can also help students to be able to self-assess. As they reflect on what others have done they can apply this to the evidence they have produced for the same task and evaluate themselves. It can also show them that there can be different ways to approach a task. 

Students are expected to peer assess from nursery through primary school, throughout secondary school and onwards. Teachers use it widely to mark short assessments, such as responses to an exam question. It also has its place in summative assessment.

Suggested peer assessment strategies

In his article Talk among yourselves: how to make peer assessment work, Michael McGarvey suggests strategies that could help teachers who want to support their students with peer assessment: 

• Providing marking guidelines that clearly define the tasks behind the marking process. 
• Breaking larger assessments down into smaller chunks and assessing in stages. 
• Leading by example: demonstrating how to provide constructive criticism and illustrative feedback when marking students’ work. 

This fits in with the teaching strategy of “I do, we do, you do”, widely practised in secondary schools. Teachers have experience of providing feedback to students and sharing how to do this effectively with your students will be of benefit to them when providing feedback to their peers for activities in their Cambridge Nationals assignments.

Effective evaluation

Assessment for learning (AfL) is a key part of what teachers do to provide feedback on progress to students about what could be improved, and it is used because we know that it develops students’ metacognition. There are a number of AfL strategies that can be used to help students evaluate the evidence they are producing for their Cambridge Nationals assignments: 

3-2-1 countdown 

• 3 things you didn’t know about this topic 
• 2 things that have surprised you about this topic 
• 1 thing you want to start doing with what you’ve learned 

Post-its 

• What have I learnt? 
• What did I find difficult/hard? 

Most … thing 

When students have finished writing part of their assignment they could identify: 

• the most challenging thing
• the most interesting thing
• the most useful thing
• the most surprising thing

When using AfL throughout the learning process – from being taught the content to working through their assignments – students develop self-reflection and self-evaluation. AfL methods can also be a strategy to provide meaningful feedback to their peers if it is an AfL that they have practised and are confident with. 

Obtaining effective feedback on the design of a plan for a nursery, a creative activity or a health promotion campaign that can be used to inform a student’s evaluation develops their metacognition and collaboration skills – both of which are needed throughout the learning journey.

Stay connected

Do share your thought in the comments below. You can also email us at vocationalqualifications@ocr.org.uk, call us on 01223 553998 or message us on X (formerly Twitter) @OCR_Health. You can also sign up to subject updates and receive information about resources and support.

About the author

Before joining OCR in 2018, Sarah was a teacher and Subject Lead of Health and Social Care in secondary schools and sixth forms in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. She has also worked as a teacher in a social care setting for young people aged 16-18 transitioning from living in care to becoming independent. At OCR Sarah has been involved in the redevelopment of Cambridge Nationals in Health and Social Care and Child Development, and the redevelopment of the Cambridge Advanced National (AAQ) in Health and Social Care.