After discussing the psychometric qualities of the assessment instrument, we will present some conclusions about the impact of student characteristics.
Principal component analysis revealed that the assessment instrument has a good internal consistency and a construct validity in line with the underlying components ‘content’ and ‘delivery’.
A substantial proportion of the variance in the assessment scores can be explained by the factor assessee. The amount of variance explained by the assessor is much smaller. We also found significant differences between the groups but the amount of explained variance is rather low. Because student perception of the instruction is important (Struyven, Dochy, & Janssens, 2003), it is reassuring that students perceptions about the use of peer assessment are very positive. We can conclude from this study that the psychometric characteristics of the assessment instrument and the perception of peer assessment justify the use of this rubric in further research and teaching and learning practice.
Self-efficacy is an important student characteristic. The positive correlation between self-efficacy and performance is in line with other research results (De Grez et al., 2009). We therefore recommend that educators try to promote self-efficacy. The relations found between self-efficacy and given scores and between perceived difficulty of assessment and given scores need further exploration.
Assessors with a high self-efficacy level tend to give more extreme scores and higher scores.
The learning effect of peer assessment in this study is small, but needs further research attention. It is possible that instruction needs to incorporate more reflection about the assessment process and attributes more time to the training of the assessors.
Future research could also study the learning effect of peer assessment on consequent oral presentations and see if skills are enhanced by observing peers. The future research could build on intervention studies to determine causal relations. Ethical limitations have of course to be taken into account.
We can conclude that the results are promising to ground alternative instructional practices, such as peer assessment.