Chinese versus UK marketing students' perceptions of peer feedback and peer assessment

•Cultural barriers to fair formal peer assessment of heterogeneous group work.•Neither Chinese nor UK students are comfortable giving formal assessment in group work.•Methods are not in place to overcome fundamental cultural issues.

The objective of this research is to explore UK and Chinese students' perceptions of peer feedback as well as assessment for coursework conducted in groups during the course of their studies at a large UK Business School. Elements of Hofstede's cultural dimensions were used to develop a theoretical framework for this study. An abductive approach was taken using systematic combining where interviews with UK and Chinese students were integrated with academic literature to ascertain general perceptions towards peer feedback and assessment. From these interviews four attitudinal issues were extracted – how comfortable students are with an assessment mode, how important they find the mode, fairness of the assessment mode, and how useful they find the mode. A survey was then distributed to final year marketing students and their perceptions of these issues were assessed. These results were subsequently presented to separate focus groups for their insights into the survey outcomes. The principal findings of the study are that there are cultural barriers to fair and consistent formal peer assessment of group work involving heterogeneous populations, particularly pertaining to collectivist/individualist backgrounds as exemplified in this study.