This paper focused on students' peer assessment and analyzed evaluation behavior using log data from the evaluation process. Peer assessments by students are problematic in terms of reliability and validity. Many previous studies have discussed the reliability and validity of peer assessments using the evaluation scores of peer assessments. In contrast, the evaluation process, that is, who, when, and which items were evaluated, and in what order, has not been studied. The purpose of this research is to answer this research question, “How do students evaluate each other during peer assessments?” To achieve this purpose, we break the research question into three sub-questions: (1) Is it worth focusing on evaluation behaviors? (2) How can we visualize evaluation behaviors? and (3) What are the characteristic evaluation behaviors? First, we investigated similar studies and considered their relationship with our proposal. Consequently, it became clear that in social science, there have been many studies that acquire process data for answering surveys and questionnaires. Therefore, also in peer assessment research, there is a possibility to gain a better understanding of how students participate in peer assessment by focusing on the process log. Second, we developed a web-based form as the peer assessment tool to detect students’ evaluation process data. Using this form, we conducted an experiment to acquire evaluation process data from a class in which assessments were made to visualize evaluation behavior. Finally, we extracted and discussed characteristic evaluation behaviors. Consequently, we identif ied characteristic evaluation behaviors such as “evaluated in a short time.” We expect these results will lead to a clarif ication of the causes of low reliability and validity in students' peer assessments that have been dif f icult to assess through conventional methods based only on the peer assessment score. Specif ically, the causes are, for example, “the students were not evaluating seriously,” “they evaluated seriously but could not evaluate properly because of a lack of evaluation ability,” or “there was room for improvement in the form design or lesson conditions.”

This study examined the psychological processes that promote active student participation in mixed-grade class activities within the framework of motivation to engage in cooperative learning and peer modeling. A questionnaire survey was conducted among the pupils of an elementary school, in which problem-solving-style mixed-grade class activities were conducted. Path analysis revealed that autonomous motivation to engage in cooperative learning inf luenced pupil perceptions of the structure of active participation in learning activities. Among third- and fourth-grade children, autonomous motivation to engage in cooperative learning reinforced perceptions of an active participation structure through dif ferent-grade peer modeling. Among f if th- and sixth-grade children, controlled motivation to engage in cooperative learning weakened perceptions of an active participation structure. These f indings underscore the important role of peer modeling and motivation in mixed-grade learning activities and suggest that the factors that facilitate active participation in mixed-grade class activities may dif fer across grades.