Students work in groups to answer five questions about vocabulary from the…

Peer assessment is a formative-assessment technique in which students engage with tasks, questions, or work through direct exchange with their classmates, rather than only through the teacher, so that assessment becomes a shared, reciprocal activity carried out between peer groups. It differs from self-assessment, where a learner judges only their own work, and from feedback, which is simply information given about performance regardless of who provides it.

In this scenario, each group works together to answer five vocabulary questions, and then the groups exchange questions with another group and try to answer them. Because this exchange and the subsequent answering take place directly between two peer groups, not through reflection on one's own group's work and not merely through comments received from a teacher, this activity is a direct instance of peer assessment.

• Self-assessment would require each group to judge its own vocabulary questions or its own answers, not another group's items; that reflective, self-directed step never happens here.

• Feedback is a broad term for any information about performance, from a teacher, book, or peer; it does not specify the reciprocal question-and-answer exchange between two peer groups that this activity describes.

• Reading assessment evaluates a learner's reading-comprehension skill specifically; the activity here involves vocabulary questions exchanged and answered between groups, not the measurement of reading ability.

So the activity described, groups exchanging and answering each other's questions, is best classified as peer assessment.