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Peer assessment enhances student learning

Feedback has a powerful influence on learning, but it is also expensive to provide. In large classes, it may even be impossible for instructors to provide individualized feedback. Peer assessment has received attention lately as a way of providing personalized feedback that scales to large classes. Besides these obvious benefits, some researchers have also conjectured that students learn by peer assessing, although no studies have ever conclusively demonstrated this effect. By conducting a randomized controlled trial in an introductory statistics class, we provide evidence that peer assessment causes significant gains in student achievement. The strength of our conclusions depends critically on the careful design of the experiment, which was made possible by a web-based platform that we developed. Hence, our study is also a proof of concept of the high-quality experiments that are possible with online tools.