Developing Critical Thinking with Peer Assessment

Peer assessment can help students become stronger writers, more confident learners, and better critical thinkers. But for instructors, one of the biggest challenges is getting students to participate consistently without sacrificing valuable class time.
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Join Ben Jackson from Georgia Southern University and David Liptrot from Kritik on October 28 at 2:00 PM EDT for Developing Critical Thinking with Peer Assessment, a practical higher education workshop on using peer feedback to deepen student engagement, reinforce course concepts, and make peer learning easier to manage at scale.
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Before using Kritik360, Ben conducted peer review in class through Google Docs. The process took up significant class time, and 30–40% of students sometimes did not complete the peer review. Since moving peer assessment outside of class, participation has increased significantly. Across hundreds of students over the past two years, only around 10 students have failed to complete the peer assessment process.

For Ben, peer assessment is about more than participation. It gives students the opportunity to see how their work compares with their peers, build confidence in their own abilities, reinforce course concepts by evaluating multiple approaches, and discover ideas they can apply back to their own work.

In this session, you’ll learn how peer assessment can help you:

• Strengthen critical thinking by asking students to evaluate, compare, and provide meaningful feedback on their peers’ work.
• Build student confidence by helping students see that their work is often more comparable to their peers than they may initially believe.
• Reinforce course concepts by having students engage with multiple examples, perspectives, and approaches.
• Increase participation by moving structured peer review outside of valuable class time.
• Reclaim class time for deeper discussion, instruction, and application of course concepts.
• Simplify participation tracking by making it easier to see which students have completed each stage of the activity.
• Surface meaningful feedback by identifying standout evaluations and sharing strong examples back with students.
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Ben Jackson will share examples from his own courses, including lessons learned from using peer assessment with hundreds of students and how the approach has helped him create more time for meaningful classroom discussion. David Liptrot will add practical strategies for structuring and scaling peer assessment across different course contexts.
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Whether you already use peer assessment or are considering introducing peer review into your course, this session will provide practical strategies for making peer learning more engaging, consistent, and scalable.

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Register now to reserve your spot.