Group work is important in our profession and students need to be prepared to provide honest critique on performance. Yet, in the classroom, more often than not, students give peers full points, regardless of whether it is deserved or not. Would love to hear strategies others have used.
I have actually been responsible for a course at the Royal Institute of Technology, where we had a related problem. In our case the course focused on communication in engineering sciences and the main task was to write a scientific report. The task was individual, but the students worked in groups regularly discussing each other's progress. Towards the end of the course each student acted as opponent on another student's "final draft". During my first years on the course the opponents' comments were often very positive and short and the comments could seldom be used to improve the reports before final submission. The comments from the opponents were not graded in any way.
I made two changes related to the opponent task the year I became course responsible 1) I added an exercise in the beginning of the course, where the students commented on an anonymized report a student had written during an earlier course round 2) I updated the grading criteria to include opponent comments - it is not possible to pass unless you provide clear and constructive feedback and justify all comments.
After the implemented changes the comments from the opponents were a lot more constructive and thorough and for the first time students highlighted, in the course evaluation, the importance of receiving critical comments from peers.
I think both 1) and 2) above are important when working with peer feedback. Letting students practice peer review/feedback on a report, an exam,... written by someone not taking the same class probably makes it easier for them to be more objective and focus on how to provide quality feedback. This practice case will hopefully make it easier when peer feedback should be given to other students taking the same class. Adding grading criteria (even if you only use P/F) clearly indicates that the peer feedback task should be taken seriously and it can also be used to force students to give clear reasons for the given feedback.
