Instructions for Peer Assessments

• You must assess everyone in your group.
• In particular, this means that you must assess yourself, as well as the others. In assessing yourself, you should try to judge your work as you would expect others to judge it. Do not humbly rate everyone above you or arrogantly claim you are above everyone, unless you feel strongly that this is a truly fair and accurate judgement.
• Read over the criteria for peer assessments carefully. You are expected to follow them faithfully in your judgements.
• You should mark a value for each of the four dimensions included in our assessments. If, for some reason you feel you cannot make a reasonable judgement for a particular dimension for some person, you must supply a comment to explain.
• Your judgements should be careful and fair. They should be unaffected by how much you like or dislike others or their points of view, just as you presumably would want others to use impartial standards when evaluating you.
• Do not rate everyone the same. It is extremely unusual for all members of a group to contribute equally. It is almost beyond belief that they all would be equal on all four dimensions. In most cases, at least one person will be higher than the majority of others and at least one person will be lower than the majority of others.
• Whenever you rate someone as Does Not Meet Expectations or Exceeds Expectations, you must add a comment to explain. This can be brief. Often, you may just want to mention which of the criteria were decisive (e.g., "missed 2 meetings," "did a great job at research"). You can append notes if you find that desirable.
• These evaluations will be absolutely confidential. No student will have any access to your evaluations at any time. Each student will be informed about the overall picture of the evaluations she or he has received from others at the end of the course. No student should ask any other student about these evaluations. If anyone feels that another student has inappropriately asked them about the evaluations, they should report it to the instructors immediately.

Criteria for Peer Assessments

Reliability, Responsibility

Does Not Meet Expectations: Often unprepared; little evidence of reading or independent study; fails to follow through with self-directed learning tasks; comes late, leaves early, or misses meetings.

Meets Expectations: Consistently prepared; has always read required materials and completed assigned tasks; always on time and ready to work.

Exceeds Expectations: Usually highly prepared, more than others; takes initiative in finding valuable resources; exceptionally thorough follow through on tasks; exerts more effort than others.

 Participation in Group Work

Does Not Meet Expectations: Disrupts group with irrelevant comments; takes up a lot of group time without contributing much; seems not to listen to others; rude, insensitive, or disrespectful of others; simply does not participate; responds defensively or aggressively when others disagree.

Meets Expectations: Cooperative and considerate of others; listens well and avoids interrupting others; contributes regularly by asking questions, offering hypotheses, and sharing information; does not dominate or intimidate; responds reasonably to disagreements.

Exceeds Expectations: Helps get others involved in discussion; helps others with their research assignments; takes an effective lead in discussion and moving the group learning forward; particularly sensitive and respectful of other members' ideas and feelings; resolves conflicts; responds gracefully to disagreement or criticism from others and tries to use it to advance group work.

  Intellectual Contribution

Does Not Meet Expectations: Displays limited knowledge acquisition; consistently unable to answer questions; consistently has difficulty identifying problems, generating hypotheses, drawing conclusions, and seeing the "big picture"; explanations illogical or poorly formulated; unable to integrate and synthesize information; has difficulty applying facts and principles to problems.

Meets Expectations: Shows reasonable knowledge of relevant materials; answers most questions adequately; contributes by identifying problems, generating hypotheses, and drawing sensible, well-formulated conclusions from information; helped generalize from the specifics and applied information toward new problems.

Exceeds Expectations: Shows outstanding acquisition of relevant knowledge; formulates particularly strong arguments; answers go beyond initial questions to offer new insights and understandings; integrates diverse pieces of information into elegant syntheses; solves difficult problems by a thoughtful application of facts and principles.

  Contribution to Written Work

Does Not Meet Expectations: This person contributed the least amount of ideas and work, significantly below others in the group.

Meets Expectations: Made a fair and average contribution to the paper.

Exceeds Expectations: Paper reflects more of this person's ideas and work than that of anyone else in the group.

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