Exchanging structured feedback with your peers

What is a 'peer'?

Peers are your colleagues, in a class, at work, at play; wherever you happen to be. A legitimate peer is someone who is roughly your equal. The idealized relationship between peers is one of mutual respect. Whether someone is your peer depends on context. Thus, a friend who is your peer as a cricket player may not be your peer within the realm of interaction design.

What is peer evaluation?

Peer evaluation refers to a wide set of practices across industry and academia that have two constant themes:

• the evaluators are peers of the evaluatees (rather than, for example, being significantly senior to them, or coming from other disciplines, or however 'peer' is being defined at the time); and
• the feedback process is semi-structured, collaboratively designed and evolving over time.

Why do we do it?

The idea behind peer evaluation is that both the evaluator and the evaluatee benefit from the process. At its best, peer evaluation is more honest than having your work evaluated by your supervisor while putting less at risk.

What's in it for them?

The idea is to help your peer improve:

• the specific piece of work you are evaluating.
  • In MutualDiscovery, that might be a lab writeup or prep assignment.
  • In a work setting, that might be their aspect of a collaborative software design,
• all of the skills they use when writing up their labs;
• and all of the skills they use when doing their labs.

What's in it for you?

Meanwhile, you get a chance to:

• see how someone else approached the same kind of work you do, while you are working on it. Even if you don't think like they do, it will help you see things clearer.
• help someone else with their work, and make new professional contacts (it's a very good idea to peer evaluate people you do not know, rather than those you do know, or at least in addition to those you already know)
• find talented people (even if you might not want to collaborate with them directly, employers love people

How to do a great peer evaluation

• Be constructive! Say something like "your discussion of the butterflies might be stronger if you .... " rather than "you lost me in the butterfly discussion." Why? Because it helps you improve your writing. It's much easier to rewrite other people's stuff than your own!
• Be specific. Following on from our previous example, you could suggest breaking the discussion of butterflies into paragraphs, or organizing the results of the observations in a table, or presenting them in a graph. Different people think in different ways; your colleague (peer) might not have thought of something specific that seems obvious to you.