360 degree peer assessment to train engineering students in giving good quality feedback

Engineering degrees need to incorporate activities to develop the students' skills and confidence in constructing quality feedback, and ability to critically analyse someone else's work. These skills are highly linked with what industry expects from graduates, and implicit requirements to gain accreditation from UK professional bodies such as The Institution of Engineering and Technology. This paper reports how a novel method of peer assessment called 360 degrees peer assessment (360PA) was used to train students to give good and insightful feedback to a piece of work, while addressing some of the traditional peer assessment limitations. 360PA was successfully applied to a variety of typical engineering assignments (technical reports, research dissertations, presentations and mathematical problems). Students and staff's quantitative and qualitative feedback were collected. Our experience suggests that the incorporation of various 360PA assignments during the degree is beneficial. Staff praise the method, students feel that 360PA has better prepared them to construct feedback (score 4.0/5), and the quality of the feedback provided by the students is consistently high (∼85 ± 5%). Recommendations for practice are given. Our approach is scalable and should appeal to anyone interested in improving students' engagement with their feedback, or in helping students to develop such critical skills, regardless of class size.