Peer assessment - week 2 PDF

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In all walks of life, people learn from and make assessments or judgements about each other. Student learning in higher education is no different. Students learn from explaining their ideas to colleagues (peer learning) and providing feedback (that may or may not include grading) on the quality of each other’s work (peer assessment). Participation in such activities can occur both outside (informally) and inside the classroom (formally). Peer assessment is a means by which learners may be encouraged to monitor and check their own progress. It recognizes that learners should be able to take responsibility in making decisions about their own learning development and this contributes to promoting their autonomy. University of People uses peer assessment as a device to reinforce students to help them understand what their problems are and how they can improve.

The benefits of peer assessment are numerous and incontrovertible. However, students must have access to official mark schemes and model answers for the process to work properly, and they must be involved in actually correcting their work. Peer assessment encourages students to transfer learning and reflection on their work, which can enhance the students learning experience. Allows students to internalize and understand better the assessment criteria. Facilitates better learning from seeing other students' successes and weaknesses. Develop students' ability to work cooperatively. Promotes lifelong learning skills. Increases student responsibility and independence. Reduces stress and increases student confidence. For academics Can be an efficient and effective way to monitor your student's progress at regular intervals and reduce the time lecturers spend dealing with the assessment. Reduce the lecturer assessment workload. Provides students with more feedback than might be the case when feedback is only given by the lecturer. While rating peers’ texts using rubrics and scoring criteria can improve students writing skills in certain contexts, students consistently benefit more from providing feedback to peers more than any other activities that are part of the peer review.

There are some challenges when giving and receiving peer feedback in a peer assessment. A lot of students have issues giving peer feedback in peer assessments Some student tends to give everyone the same mark. Students can be unwilling to make a judgment about their peers. Some student feels ill-equipped to do the assessment. As for receiving feedback, the students need to be open-minded. Can ask their peers for the type of feedback they need – this keeps the control of feedback with each student. Should check their self-assessment against what their peers are saying. Ask for clarification and use the feedback to feed-forward into ongoing assignment work. Some students may not take feedback at all from their peers. Different ability levels since some students have limited knowledge about the topic and this can affect the assessment. Some student finds their assessment beyond their expectation, so they disagree with that and get emotionally stuck and don’t accept it. Students new to critically reviewing their peers’ work may focus on providing positive comments or making surface level corrections rather than providing meaningful, high level feedback. Modeling effective feedback is important. Inexperienced student writers also may view revisions as “cleaning up” and revise their texts in a linear manner based on the feedback they receive rather than looking at the overall meaning and structure of their argument.

Some of the most familiar assessment strategies are quizzes, tests, s standardized tests, and essays. You should already have clearly written learning objectives associated with each assignment. The students should only need to complete assignments in order to practice/be assessed upon some particular targeted skill, and the assignment should have been designed to elicit that skill. Written assessments are hard, and the quality of assessment tends to drastically vary based on the assessor. So, it’s important to give very clear guidelines on what to check, how to check, and how to validate.

There are great opportunities and advantages for learners in providing feedback on and assessing each other’s work. Using and helping develop assessment criteria takes students deeper into their learning and enables feedback and reflection on learning and the sharing of the new meaning that appears. In peer assessment students make decisions about each other’s work and decide what constitutes ‘good work’. Peer assessment highlights to students the value of peer learning as an educational approach and recognizes the effort and commitment required to participate in it. Peer assessment is a natural extension of the move from a teacher-centered to a studentcentered model of education, which emphasizes the active engagement of students in their learning, learner responsibility, metacognitive skills, and a dialogical, collaborative model of teaching and learning....