Peer Assessment in evaluation of Medical sciences students

Introduction: Recently, peer assessment is especially noticed as a progress evaluation method. Although it is a known method, it is a novel method in many countries that they use traditional methods. Then the topic of current review article is peer assessment in medical education. Methods: The documents related to peer assessment, advantages, disadvantages, applications and how use it extracted of articles, books and report of researches in reliable sources. Results: Peer assessment is a comprehensive evaluation of peer student performance and activities. The main aim of using this method was to produce more correspondence to own learning and peer learning. Of advantages for this method might be mentioned like increasing in student perception of his/her learning, encourage students to accept accountability for their learning, give and get feedback, encourage students to deep learning. The peer assessment is used in evaluation for communication skills, professionalism and effective domain. In peer assessment we should notice to some points: determine assessment criteria, discussion between students after peer assessment, confidence of sufficient time and educating it to students. Also we should notice to some limitations like the correlation between characteristics and results of assessment. Conclusion: Peer assessment is an evaluation method, that if it was used correct and proper, it could be an effective method in formative evaluation for some domains of medical education like affective domain. It is necessary, according to the gap in evaluation of these domains of medical education, we use better of this cheap and accessible tool.