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to The Griffith Graduate Site Creativity & Innovation Toolkit
ASSESSMENT:
Assessing students’ creativity 
Peer review or critique of creative work
Why not:
Do what many of the visual and performing arts, design, engineering and architectural disciplines do: run “analytical appraisals,” in which all students get the chance to give feedback on their peers’ (and their own) work. You, as lecturer or tutor, can give your own evaluation (and justification for it), and answer their questions. Time constraints mean that feedback has to be succinct, but meaningful.
Benefits of peer review
| Benefits to students of peer review of creative work | |
|---|---|
| Better learning outcomes through opportunities to improve drafts or works in progress before submission or completion | The questions and comments from peers can challenge students to rethink or reconceptualise. |
| A sense of a wider audience | By sharing their work-in-progress with their peers, students are exposed to a wider audience than their lecturer or tutor. |
| Practice in giving and receiving criticism | Listening to others’ opinions, answering their questions, justifying their own rationale and ideas, and doing the same for other students, improves communication skills, critical evaluation and analytical skills, and prepares students for the real world. |
| Enhanced communication skills | Talking with peers about their creative work can strengthen students’ ability to say what they think, while maintaining the balance between criticism and tact. |
| Increased confidence | Students frequently believe their peers’ work is much better than their own. Being able to see what their peers are working on, or what they have submitted for assessment, shows them that it is safe to loosen up and take risks in developing their own ideas. |
Benefits of peer review to lecturers and tutors |
| Higher standards in work submitted for assessment | The flow-on effect of peer review is tangible, and shows in the quality of creative work submitted for assessment. Students are more likely than otherwise to revisit or rethink their own work before assessment when it has been critiqued by their peers. Peer review may even reduce marking time. |
| Higher levels of student engagement | Inevitably, there is some anxiety and nervousness about showing creative work to an audience of peers. The associated adrenalin rush can result in higher levels of student engagement during peer review or critique sessions than in a regular tutorial session. |
| Higher evaluation ratings | Students tend to rate peer review sessions highly (not in itself a justification for its use!). |
Adapted from: Creating Effective Peer-Response Workshops. University of Minnesota.
Retrieved from the World Wide Web on 4 April, 2005:
http://writing.umn.edu/tww/responding_grading/peer_workshop.htm
