Peer Assessment of Contributions to a Group Project: Student attitudes to holistic and category-based approaches

This article complements two previous papers which presented quantitative data about methods of peer assessment within a group project. The previous quantitative papers indicated that holistic peer assessment supports the purposes of summative group assessment better than category-based peer assessment. The qualitative findings presented here support this notion. Student attitudes towards the two methods of peer assessment were more supportive of the holistic approach than the category-based approach. This article raises the question as to whether the method of peer assessment has some influence on the extent to which students work cooperatively in a group setting.