Working Papers
in Language Education and Research
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STUDENT ATTITUDES TOWARD PEERASSESSMENT OF SMALL GROUPPRESENTATIONS
Name: Donald Patterson

ISSN 2187-4972

Corresponding Author:
patterson-d@kanda.kuis.ac.jp
Publication date: February, 2014

To cite this article:

Patterson, D. (2014). Student attitudes towards peer assessment of small
group presentations. Working Papers in Language Education and Research, 2(1), 42-56.

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  STUDENT ATTITUDES TOWARD PEER ASSESSMENT OF SMALL GROUPPRESENTATIONS
Donald Patterson
Kanda University of International Studies

ABSTRACT
How do students feel about evaluating their peers and being evaluated by them whengiving presentations? What can an instructor do to ensure students receive adequate
feedback in larger classes? This paper addresses these questions by describing apreliminary study examining the efficacy of peer feedback on affect in small-grouppresentations. The methods and results described herein were presented at the 9th
CamTESOL Conference on English language teaching on February 23, 2013 inPhnom Penh, Cambodia.

1. INTRODUCTION

Presentations are a common feature of many English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes at
the university level as they provide students the opportunity to utilize a variety of skills including
research, writing, and public speaking. In traditional classroom settings, students take turns standingat the front of the class to present their work with their peers as the audience and teacher as soleevaluator. While the traditional method does provide the students practice in the aforementioned
skills, there are several notable drawbacks:•

Student-talking time in the class is limited to just the few minutes allotted for theirpresentations.

•

There is little extrinsic incentive to listen and learn from peers.

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•

Students who have not yet presented, may be too concerned with their own presentations toconcentrate on their peers’.

•

As Kwok (2008, p. 84) notes, assessment of student work in the traditional classroom tends
take a top-down summative approach with the point of giving grades rather than constructive
criticism.
The author of the present study decided to address these points through the use of a more

student-centred approach. At the suggestion of a colleague, a class format utilizing interactive
presentations performed on a loop with peer feedback was adopted so as to increase student-talking
time and to involve the students more in the assessment process. A similar approach is described in
Brown and Diem (2009); and a preliminary study by Lynch and MacLean (2000) suggests linguistic
benefits for learners performing a speaking task on a loop.
Topping (2009, p. 20) defines peer feedback as “an arrangement for learners to consider andspecify the level, value, or quality of a product or performance of other equal-status learners”. It is
becoming more common in student-centred classes as it turns audience members from passive toactive observers; helps develop critical thinking; and provides a greater volume of richer,individualized feedback for students.
Research has shown peer feedback to be associated with positive cognitive gains for both
evaluatees and evaluators (Rollinson, 2004, p. 24; Topping, 2009, p. 22). While the results of theresearch on peer feedback have been encouraging, most of the attention has been focused on its effecton writing and little research has looked into how students feel about peer feedback on their spoken
output.
One small-scale study that has examined students’ perceptions of the value of peer evaluation
with regards to an oral project was conducted by Kwok (2008) with 19 Cantonese-speaking first-year
undergraduate students in Hong Kong. It found that students felt that peer evaluation was both fair43

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  and helpful; however, they expressed a preference for teacher-based assessment. The present study
builds upon Kwok’s work by examining student attitudes towards peer feedback of small grouppresentations as a supplement to teacher feedback in the context of a Japanese university with a larger
sample size.

2. METHOD

The following broad research questions guided the study:1) How do students feel about their dual roles as evaluators and evaluatees in small grouppresentations?
2) How fair and useful do students feel feedback from their peers and teachers is?

2.1 Participants / Setting
The study was carried out with eighty-eight (N=88) students (female=70, male=18;
juniors=65, seniors=23) in five classes of a 15-week elective content-based English language course
at a small university with a focus on foreign languages, located in the Kanto region of Japan from Fall
2011-Fall 2012.

2.2 Procedure
Each student was responsible for two individual presentations of 12 minutes in length whichwere repeated three to four times on a loop with changing audiences of two to three people. The
presentations comprised two parts: a formal presentation and a related topic discussion. Presenters
received both quantitative and qualitative feedback on both parts from their peers in written form,
which had a fifty-percent bearing on their score, with the other fifty percent coming from the teacher.

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  At the end of the course, both qualitative and quantitative data was collected by means of aquestionnaire. The questionnaire utilized a 6-point Likert scale and open questions asking how
students felt about their experience as both an evaluator and evaluatee. Student participation was
voluntary and anonymous.

2.3 Explanation of the Peer Feedback Form
In order to provide peer feedback, students utilized a standard form provided by the teacher(Appendix A). The form requested that students provide constructive criticism and a score from 1 to
5 (with 1 indicating poor performance and 5 indicating excellence) to rate the presenter’s proficiency
in two areas: the presentation itself and the presenter-guided discussion that followed. Students were
given time in class following each presentation to compose their feedback. The feedback forms were
submitted at the end of the class and the teacher compiled the scores and written feedback for each
student. Presenters received a feedback form the following week with a combined teacher and peerscore; a number of typical peer feedback comments indicating the points they had done well and thepoints they needed to improve; and constructive criticism from the teacher.
All of the students in the course were juniors or seniors and had received training in previous
courses on what constitutes a good presentation. Early in the course, criteria for good and badpresentations were briefly reviewed, but considering the students’ experience, minimal training fortheir role as evaluator was provided beyond the explanation of how to complete the feedback form.

2.4 Explanation of the Questionnaire
The questionnaire (Appendix B) was given as a two-page paper form with three parts: Part 1,
which focused on the students’ role as presenter/evaluatee; Part 2, which considered their role as peer
evaluator; and Part 3 which invited students to share any general comments they had about the45

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  presentation classes. Part 1 comprised 13 statements, each employing a 6-point Likert scale tomeasure the degree to which students agreed or disagreed; space was provided for students to explain
why they had or had not enjoyed their role as presenter. Part 2 comprised 8 statements, employing thesame Likert scale as in Part 1; space was again provided for students to explain why they had or had
not enjoyed their role as evaluator. Part 3 was open-ended and provided space for students’comments. The following section presents the quantitative data from the 10 questionnaire statementsthat were deemed the most salient to the research questions, as well as relevant qualitative responses.

3. RESULTS

Table 1. Student responses to selected questionnaire statements regarding oral presentation evaluation(N=80)
1. I enjoyed the classes as apresenter.
2. I enjoyed the classes as anevaluator.
3. I think the peer (student)
written comments were fair.
4. I was a fair marker.
5. I think the teacher’s writtencomments were fair.
6. I think that the peer (student)
written comments were useful.
7. I think the teacher’s writtencomments were useful.
8. Being an evaluator made iteasy to focus on the presentation.
9. Being an evaluator made it
hard to focus on the presentation.

Mode

Mean

SD

Agree
(%)

Disagree
(%)

5

4.99

0.80

97.50

2.50

5

4.84

1.02

87.50

10.00

5

5.20

0.93

93.75

6.25

5
6

4.93
5.64

0.88
0.88

95.00
96.25

5.00
3.75

6

5.26

0.82

96.25

3.75

6

5.79

0.50

100.00

0.00

5

4.48

1.17

82.50

17.50

3

3.18

1.14

38.80

60.00

(N.B.: Not all percentages total 100% as not all students elected to respond to every question.)46

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  Table 1 presents the results for selected questions from Parts 1 and 2 of the questionnaire.
As described in the methodology section, students responded to various statements regarding theirroles as evaluators and evaluatees through the use of a Likert scale to gauge their level of agreement
or disagreement. (The scale ranged from 1 through 6 with the following meanings assigned: 1 =strongly disagree; 2 = quite disagree; 3 = slightly disagree; 4 = slightly agree; 5 = quite agree; 6 =strongly agree.)Selected items from Parts 1 and 2 of the questionnaire have been grouped above for ease ofcomparison under the following categories: how enjoyable the presentations were; how fair the
students felt the feedback was; how useful the students felt the feedback was; and how easy ordifficult being an evaluator made it to focus on the presentations. Below is a report of the qualitativeand quantitative data generated on these categories.

3.1 How Enjoyable Were the Presentations?
Nearly all of the students indicated that they enjoyed their role as presenter with 97.5%
indicating agreement with Item 1 in Table 1. The number of students who enjoyed evaluating theirpeers (Item 2) was 10% lower at 87.5%, but still a strong majority.
In their written comments, several students indicated that they enjoyed evaluating their peers,
as it was a good opportunity to learn from their peers’ presentation styles and reflect on their own
presentation skills. One student expressed the sentiment this way, “I enjoyed listening to myclassmates’ presentations thinking about the differences between mine and theirs.”
On the other hand, several indicated they would have been more comfortable as evaluatorswith more explicit training, a more structured rating form (e.g. using a Likert scale), a more formal
format for the presentation, or more time to consider their feedback.

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  3.2 How Fair Was Peer and Teacher Feedback?
A strong majority of students felt that evaluation from both their peers, at 93.75%, and theteacher, at 96.25%, (Items 3 and 5 respectively), was “fair”, but with a difference of 2.5%, a slight
preference for the teacher was indicated. The majority of students also felt that they were capable offair evaluation with 95.0% expressing agreement with the statement “I was a fair marker” (Item 4). It
is notable that Items 3 and 4 indicate that the percentages of students who felt that they were fairly
evaluated by their peers and those who felt that they were capable of fairly evaluating their peers weresimilar at 93.75% and 95.0% respectively.
Several students expressed a lack of confidence in their ability to evaluate their peers fairly
due to a lack of training and/or time. Representative comments include:•“I’m not good at evaluation of other people. I want to teach me how to evaluate fairly.”•“[The time] was a little bit for small presentations. If it was more formal I could evaluate it
more fairly (clearly).”•“I could enjoy as an evaluator but I didn’t have much time to evaluate in class. Therefore,
sometimes my evaluate was not good.”•“Evaluator was a difficult job for me, it was hard to mark the score in each person. But I
enjoyed classmates’ presentations.”

On the positive side, one student commented that he/she was happy to provide peer feedback: “It wasa good opportunity to let presenters know what I thought about their presentations. I just hope mycomments helped.”

3.3 How Useful Was Peer and Teacher Feedback?
A strong majority of students also agreed that peer comments were “useful” at 96.25% andthey were unanimous in their agreement that the teacher’s comments were useful (Items 6 and 748

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  respectively). Some students felt that immediate oral feedback would have been more beneficial thanthe collected written feedback when the presentation was still fresh in their minds and so they could
have applied it to subsequent performances in the loop.

3.4 How Easy or Difficult Did Being an Evaluator Make Focusing on the Presentations?
As audience members, students had two challenging tasks; they were asked to focus oncontent presented in a foreign language while simultaneously evaluating the presenter’s performance.
Items 8 and 9 from Table 1 probed students’ attitudes toward how their role as evaluator affected theirability to concentrate on the content of the presentations. The two items explored students’ attitudes
from opposing directions (i.e. ease and difficulty). While the percentages of respondents who agreed
with Item 8 and disagreed with Item 9 and vice versa do not correlate perfectly, it is clear that amajority of students felt that evaluating their peers’ performances helped them to focus on thecontent. Perhaps a more useful measure of students’ attitudes than the percentages of those who
agreed or disagreed with the statements is the mean responses. With the Likert scale running from 16, there was no middle neutral option. Yet, with mean scores of 4.48 and 3.18 for Items 8 and 9
respectively, it is evident that a number of students had mixed feelings.

Being an evaluator helped me tobecome a better presenter (N=80)
Strongly agree (34people)Quite agree (30)Slightly agree (13)Slightly disagree (2)Fig. 1. Student responses to the questionnaire statement: “Being anevaluator helped me become a better presenter.”49

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  Figure 1 shows students’ responses to the statement “Being an evaluator helped me to becomea better presenter” from Part 2 of the questionnaire. There was near unanimous agreement among
students that being an evaluator had helped them to become a better presenter with 96.25% indicatingsome form of agreement and 42.5% expressing strong agreement.
A recurring written comment was that students felt that they were able to enhance their own
presentation skills by critically observing a variety of their peers' presentations. The following
comments typify this sentiment:•“It was really interesting to see classmates’ presentations. I learned from everyone’s way topresent. They were very nice.”•“To see many classmate’s presentation, I can learn a lot of things. It can connect to improve
my presentation.”•“During the presentations, I thought about their good points and bad points to write anevaluation sheet. I could find some good points that I want to take.”•“I could know about various topics and learn other students’ good presentation skills.”

4. DISCUSSION

The purpose of this study was to shed light on student attitudes toward peer and teacher
assessment of small-group oral presentations. Echoing Kwok’s (2008) results, students expressed apreference for teacher evaluation over peer evaluation, but still expressed a high level of satisfaction
with the feedback from their classmates. They indicated that they considered peer feedback to be both
fair and useful, and that the process of evaluating their peers was beneficial to their own development
as presenters.

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  Interestingly, student feedback was often of a different nature than that provided by theteacher, likely owing to the different perspectives and expectations. Students frequently commented
on: the interest level of the topic; the amount of preparation and enthusiasm; ease of explanation;
legibility of PowerPoint slides; and the quality of voice, particularly speed and volume. On the other
hand, the teacher drew more attention to: grammar and spelling; posture and gestures; pronunciationand intonation; time management; and the citation of sources.
This division was not intentional on the teacher’s part initially. However, once it had been
noticed, the teacher realized how different his perspective of the presentations was by not being an
audience member or peer. The teacher also recognized that more comprehensive feedback wasprovided by the combination of teacher and peers as they were commenting on different, but still
important aspects of the same presentations.
While the study focused on affect, it was interesting to note that there was a moderatecorrelation between the grades given by the teacher and by the students at 0.5330151. Surprisingly,
there was no correlation between the grades students gave and those they received at 0.010521509.
While student marks tended to group around the median, they were able discriminate between
performances. This ability to discriminate between stronger and weaker performances supports theassumption that students had received sufficient training through their previous courses to becompetent peer evaluators of presentations. Nonetheless, it is clear from their comments that somewould have felt more confident as evaluators had they received more formal evaluation training
and/or more specific grading criteria. As Otoshi and Heffernen (2008, p. 66) suggest, one way theteacher may address this is through the co-creation of an evaluation rubric with the students.
Students appeared to take their roles as evaluators seriously. They were generous andthoughtful with their comments, and very few simply gave all the same scores indiscriminately. The
seriousness with which students approached their roles as evaluators enabled the teacher to provide a51

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  greater volume of feedback than would be possible on his own. That said, it should be noted that theuse of student assessment did not result in any time savings as much time was needed to tabulate
student scores and compile student comments. This, however, is something that could likely be
improved upon by replacing paper-based feedback with online tools such as Google Drive’s forms(for surveys) and spreadsheets.
5. CONCLUSION

While there are limitations to the applicability of this research due to the particularcomposition of the sample (e.g. approximately 80% female) and the reliability of student responses
about their own feelings, the results are encouraging. They suggest that peer assessment is a positive,
welcome supplement to teacher-based assessment, particularly in terms of constructive criticism.
Students indicated that they appreciated the wealth of feedback provided. Reassuringly, mostindicated that they did indeed read the comments and reflected on them before their next presentation.
Going forward, the study begs two questions: 1) What effect does peer feedback have on students’language production in subsequent performances; and 2) How do students react to peer assessment in
the absence of teacher-based assessment? Further research on these topics is required.

6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author wishes to thank the Research Institute of Language Studies and Language
Education (RILS & LE) at Kanda University of International Studies for providing the financial
support required to present at the 9th CamTESOL Conference in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in 2013. The
author would also like to thank Dwayne Cover for suggesting the presentation format; the reviewers

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  of this paper for their valuable suggestions; and conference attendees for their thought-provoking
feedback.

7. REFERENCES

Brown, I., & Diem, R. (2009). Oral presentations reinvigorated: An alternative way to conduct andassess student presentations. Studies in Languages and Cultures, (24), 79–91. Retrieved fromhttps://qir.kyushu-u.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2324/13981/1/p079.pdf
Dörnyei, Z. (2008). Questionnaires in second language research: Construction, administration, andprocessing. Routledge.
Kwok, L. (2008). Students’ perception of peer evaluation and teachers’ role in seminar discussions.
Electronic Journal of Foreign Language Teaching, 5(1), 84–97. Retrieved from http://eflt.nus.edu.sg/v5n12008/kwok.pdf
Lynch, T., & Maclean, J. (2000). Exploring the benefits of task repetition and recycling for classroom
language learning. Language Teaching Research, 4(3), 221–250.
doi:10.1177/136216880000400303
Otoshi, J., & Heffernen, N. (2008). Factors predicting effective oral presentations in EFL
classrooms. Asian EFL Journal, 10(1), 65-78. Retrieved from http://asian-efljournal.com/March_2008_EBook.pdf#page=65
Rollinson, P. (2005). Using peer feedback in the ESL writing class. ELT journal,59(1), 23-30.
Retrieved from http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/content/59/1/23.short
Topping, K. J. (2009). Peer Assessment. Theory Into Practice, 48(1), 20–27. Retrieved fromhttp://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00405840802577569

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  Appendix A

Presentation Feedback
Name: ____________________
As your classmates are presenting, you should watch and listen carefully. When they arefinished, I will give you some time to write down some comments and give a mark out 10
points – 5 points for the presentation and 5 points for the discussion activity. Your
comments will be shared with the presenters anonymously, so please try to answer honestly.
Try to give constructive criticism in order to help your peers improve.
Presenter’s name: _________________________
Topic: ______________________
Write your comments for the PRESENTATION here. Think about how well the presenters speak and their preparation.

/5

Write your comments for the DISCUSSION ACTIVITY. Think about how interesting and how enjoyable it was.

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  Appendix B
Questionnaire: Presentation Classes
This questionnaire is about your experience in this course’s presentation and discussion classes. There arequestions about your experience as both a presenter and as an evaluator (judge).
The information will only be used for research purposes. Your individual responses are anonymous andconfidential, so please answer honestly. The questions use the following scale:
Strongly disagree

Quite disagree

1

2

Slightly disagree

Slightly agree

3

4

Quite agree

Strongly agree

56Part 1: Please think about your experience as a presenter for this part. Please circle your answer.
1.	
  I enjoyed the classes as a presenter.

1-------2-------3-------4-------5-------6

Please	  explain	
  w hy	  or	
  w hy	  not:	  2. 	
  Presenting 3-4 times in one day helped me improve.

1-------2-------3-------4-------5-------6

3. 	
  I read the written comments about my presentations.

1-------2-------3-------4-------5-------6

4. 	
  I think the peer (student) written comments were fair.

1-------2-------3-------4-------5-------6

5. 	
  I think that the peer (student) written comments were useful. 1-------2-------3-------4-------5-------6
6. 	
  I think the teacher’s written comments were fair.

1-------2-------3-------4-------5-------6

7.	
  I think the teacher’s written comments were useful.

1-------2-------3-------4-------5-------6

8. 	
  I thought about the written comments when I prepared my1-------2-------3-------4-------5-------6

	  second presentation.
9. 	
  I felt that my second presentation was better than my first.

1-------2-------3-------4-------5-------6

10. I prefer my peers as the evaluator (judge) of my work.

1-------2-------3-------4-------5-------6

11. I prefer the teacher as the evaluator (judge) of my work.

1-------2-------3-------4-------5-------6

12. Written comments are more important to me than a score.

1-------2-------3-------4-------5-------6

13. A score is more important to me than written comments.

1-------2-------3-------4-------5-------655

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  Strongly disagree

Quite disagree

1

Slightly disagree

2

Slightly agree

3

4

Quite agree

5Strongly agree

6Part 2: Please think about your experience as an evaluator (judge) for this part. Please circle your answer.
1.

I enjoyed the classes as an evaluator.

1-------2-------3-------4-------5-------6

Please	  explain	
  w hy	  or	
  w hy	  not:	
  2.

I was a lenient (easy) marker.

1-------2-------3-------4-------5-------6

3.

I was a fair marker.

1-------2-------3-------4-------5-------6

4.

I was a strict (hard) marker.

1-------2-------3-------4-------5-------6

5.

I became a better evaluator each time.

1-------2-------3-------4-------5-------6

6.

Being an evaluator made it easy to focus on the presentation.

1-------2-------3-------4-------5-------6

7.

Being an evaluator made it hard to focus on the presentation.

1-------2-------3-------4-------5-------6

8.

Being an evaluator helped me become a better presenter.

1-------2-------3-------4-------5-------6

Part 3: Do you have any general comments about the presentation and discussion classes?
Please	  explain	
  in	
  detail:	
  Thank you for your help!
[Questionnaire adapted from Dörnyei (2008) and Kwok (2008)]
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