Google Forms for Peer Assessment

Peer assessment is a great idea. It means you can get students to really work with the rubric, and in the process learn to self-assess and reflect on their own learning, those super-valuable metacognitive habits of mind.

BUT it can be a logistical problem. 25 class members multiplied by 25 assessments, with say 5 criteria to assess. That's 3125 items of data! What are you going to do with that? Well, you can start by using a Google Form to collect the data, and then analyse the data with a pivot table. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Create your form based on your rubric. Keep it simple and short, while still retaining the main skills which you would like students to really think about.
2. Include a question: who is being assessed? Pre-populate this with a list of students in your class. TIP: you can copy a list off a spreadsheet and paste it.
3. Include a question: who is doing the assessment? Provide the options: A classmate, Myself, The teacher
4. Include a glows (positives) and grows (suggestions for improvement) open-ended text question.
5. Whan all the assessments are complete, open the spreadsheet where the responses are recorded.
6. Select Insert > Pivot Table from the menu. Create a new sheet.
7. Under Rows, select: who is being assessed and who is doing the assessment.
8. Under values select each of your rubric criteria and set them as follows: Values as Columns; Summarise by Average.
9. This should give you 3 scores for each student for each criterion. It is interesting and useful to compare them. Does the student undervalue or overvalue herself in relation to you and/or the peers? This can lead to a useful discussion.
10. To get a single score for each, close up the student by clicking the minus.
11. The way I use the scores is to add them to a rubric for a bigger project/assignment in Google Classroom. Eg if this peer assessment is for a presentation, I score the technical aspects of the presentation in a rubric and then add the peer assessment criteria to the same rubric. 
12. The way I use the glows & grows is to copy all the relevant cells from the main spreadsheet and paste them into the comments section of the assessment screen in Google Classroom. If you want to summarise the comments, use an AI tool to create a summary of all the comments for each student before pasting into the comments section.