Empowering dental students' collaborative learning using peer assessment

As dental educators, we face challenges evaluating students' case presentations, including providing balanced assessments, timely constructive feedback and fostering both technical and professional skills. Traditional evaluation methods often led to student anxiety and missed peer-learning opportunities. Our goal was to create a supportive learning environment mirroring professional dental practice's collaborative nature.

Adapted from social constructivism, peer assessment was used to enhance student learning. We envisioned a classroom where peer interaction could sharpen critical assessment skills and develop key capabilities in students, such as taking responsibility for their learning, understanding assessment criteria and developing critical reflection skills. This approach aimed to diversify learning experiences, enhance teamwork and better prepare students for clinical and professional settings.

The challenge was to design an assessment framework reflecting real-world clinical situations while promoting formative development and collegiality among students.¹

A comprehensive peer evaluation system was developed and implemented for dental students' case presentations across 4th to 6th year courses. The system was based on the collaborative learning model with formative assessment for students' oral case presentations. Training materials, grading rubrics and feedback mechanisms were developed to ensure consistent and reliable peer assessments that aligned with the objectives of collaborative learning and continuous improvement.

The peer assessment system was implemented as follows: 120 dental students began the programme in their 4th year practiced the assessment method throughout their 4th, 5th and 6th years of study. Students at each level were divided into small groups within their levels to collaborate on case presentations. Within each group, students alternated between roles of presenter and reviewer, ensuring a broad range of experiences and perspectives. Evaluators provided targeted training to students on conducting effective peer assessments, including how to give constructive feedback and use the assessment rubrics. The assessment system combined peer with conventional evaluator grading, allowing for comparison between the two methods. Data comparing student peer grading with faculty grades throughout the implementation period were collected. The analysis focused on how the discrepancy between student and faculty grades changed over time as students gained more experience with the assessment method. An annual survey was distributed after the 3-year implementation to gauge student satisfaction and comfort with the peer assessment method. And, finally, students were engaged in reflective exercises to ensure continuous learning from the peer assessment process. In doing so, this initiative emphasised building supportive environments for collaborative discussions and peer feedback, seeking to enhance students' learning experiences throughout their academic progression.

Over 3 years of implementing this peer assessment system, we observed, we found that this strategy was able to narrow the gap between evaluator and peer grading over time; increase students' satisfaction and appreciation for improved critical thinking, communication and presentation skills; increase students' comfort receiving feedback from peers; enhance teamwork and fair, constructive feedback; better prepare students for professional roles in collaborative work environments; and reduce difficulties in consistency and time management. As such, integrating peer assessment within dental curricula showed promising results towards enhancing students' learning experiences, professional skill development and collaborative learning. We recommend further research into long-term impacts on professional practice and exploration of broader integration of peer evaluation across health professions education.

Marwa Madi: Conceptualization; investigation; writing – original draft; methodology. Shazia Sadaf: Methodology; validation; writing – original draft. Amal Asiri: Investigation; methodology; writing – original draft; data curation.

All authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.

The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by the Institutional Review Board of Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University (IRB-2023-02-2162).