Effects of Behavioral Anchors on Peer Evaluation Reliability

This paper presents comparisons of three peer evaluation instruments tested among students in undergraduate engineering classes: a single‐item instrument without behavioral anchors, a ten‐item instrument, and a single‐item behaviorally anchored instrument. Studies using the instruments in undergraduate engineering classes over four years show that the use of behavioral anchors significantly improves the inter‐rater reliability of the single‐item instrument. The inter‐rater reliability (based on four raters) of the behaviorally anchored instrument was 0.78, which was not significantly higher than that of the ten‐item instrument (0.74), but it was substantially more parsimonious. The results of this study add to the body of knowledge on evaluating students' performance in teams. This is critical since the ability to function in multidisciplinary teams is a required student learning outcome of engineering programs.