QUICK RESOURCE SHEET #30

Peer assessment

Is peer assessment merely another catchphrase bandied about at teachers’ conferences, or is there some merit in giving students the tools to assess one another’s progress? In addition to the benefits from teaching students how to evaluate the work of their peers, instructors engaging in this process might find they learn a great deal about their own teaching habits, and consequently develop new and effective strategies for achieving their goals in the classroom. According to research summarized on the website http://www.ccsu.edu/teachexcelessays/making_peer_feddback_more_valuab.htm, “…peer assessment affords students much more immediate and frequent feedback than one instructor can possibly provide…(Topping, 1998).  Most importantly the research finds that peer learning and assessment help students develop communication skills, the ability to collaborate, critical thinking, and habits of life-long learning (Dochy, Segers, & Sluijsmans, 1999; Topping, 1998).”

http://www.eslteachersboard.com/cgi-bin/articles/index.pl?noframes;read=966

This article is not, strictly speaking, exclusively about peer assessment, but it’s a thought-provoking look at the role of the teacher in the language classroom, and serves as an excellent backdrop to an exploration of how students can learn to look at and meaningfully assess the work of their classmates.

http://www.keele.ac.uk/depts/cs/Stephen_Bostock/docs/bostock_peer_assessment.htm

“Student assessment of other students' work, both formative and summative, has many potential benefits to learning for the assessor and the assessee. It encourages student autonomy and higher order thinking skills. Its weaknesses can be avoided with anonymity, multiple assessors, and tutor moderation. With large numbers of students the management of peer assessment can be assisted by Internet technology.”

http://www.nclrc.org/portfolio/formWritingRubricPeer.html

http://www2.mcsdk12.org/eng/peerassessrub.htm

http://www.ece.utexas.edu/bell/newLegacy/files/peerassessment.rtf

I’ve grouped these three sites together as they give different examples of formats or rubrics to be used by students when evaluating their peers. They were, of course, designed for specific teaching contexts and will not apply to every situation, but they give you an idea of different ways to organize the task of peer assessment, to provide students with a framework for evaluating. That said, if you are considering delving into peer assessment, be sure to have a look at the next link, which is a rubric template. In other words, students can use it to design their own rubric for evaluating their peers – or this could be done as a class activity. By doing so, you and your class can come up with a more meaningful tool for measuring than merely relying on one of the boilerplate rubrics linked above.

http://edweb.sdsu.edu/triton/july/rubrics/Rubric_Template.html

A rubric template. See above for details.