Student Perspectives of Peer Assessment in Programming Courses

Peer assessment is a common form of shared learning in which students provide feedback on each other's work. Despite the crucial role that students play in peer assessment, programming students’ perspectives on such practices are relatively under-researched. Therefore, the first objective of this study was to explore the perspectives of programming students toward peer assessment in programming courses. The second was to discuss the students’ expectations and critical issues during development of the peer assessment system. The third was to evaluate a peer assessment prototype based on programming students’ perspectives. Iterative focus group discussions were conducted with 87 programming students from computing school, which were conducted in the academic years 2019/02, 2019/09, and 2020/09. Thematic analysis was chosen as the data analysis method. The participants reported favourable impressions of peer assessment as a learning tool. They asserted that the clear rubric, self-assessment, and visual feedback of their peer assessments caught their attention. This research also indicates that students must be rewarded for their peer assessment efforts. Students are concerned mainly about the credibility of the assessors giving feedback on their work, but they suggested methods for matching reviewers and authors to reduce such concern. The output was a Peer Programmer prototype website that contains a group of requirements that could be considered in developing a peer assessment system for programming students.