Definition of Peer Evaluations

Peer evaluations are assessments, ratings, or evaluations of a person's product or performance, that are carried out by peers, as opposed to by a teacher, supervisor, parent, or expert. The precise form and nature of the peer evaluation varies according to the context.

School Papers

• As a learning tool, many teachers and professors have students give feedback to each other about papers. Students learn from the comments given by other students, but also learn from the process of evaluating other students’ papers.

Work Place Evaluations

• Peer evaluations are sometimes used as a component of work place performance evaluations . They typically also use supervisor evaluations, self-evaluations and objective performance criteria such as gross sales, new clients, net income generated, number of products produced, number and quality of publications, and attendance.

Sociological and Psychological Research

• Sociologists and psychologists obtain peer evaluations when they are interested in social attribution and social influence processes. Studies of popularity, interpersonal attraction, power, role modeling, peer influence, persuasion, peer perceptions, esteem, and social networking utilize peer evaluations, more out of interest in evaluating the evaluator and the evaluation process than due to interest in the ratings of the target subject per se.

Peer Reviews

• Peer evaluations are used within professional and creative fields as a means to establish and maintain uniform quality of performance within the field. For example, many professional journals use peer evaluations to weed out articles that do not meet rigorous professional standards.

Utility

• Despite reluctance on the part of those who are being evaluated by peers, peer evaluations in varied settings appear to have at least modest associations with other measures.