Peer Assessment

An area of development for me is to introduce peer assessment to my students. This started in 2014 and is a working progress.

“Self and peer assessment is about revision and improvement. It enables students to independently assess their own and other students’ progress with confidence rather than always relying on teacher judgement. When students self and peer assess, they are actively involved in the learning process and their independence and motivation is improved.”

from http://assessment.tki.org.nz/

The links below are just some examples of Peer Assessment. Reflections follow the links.

For me, Self and Peer Assessment is something I will continue to work on. As I move into new schools, there needs to be the teaching aspect of how to assess yourself or your peer. Students don't just know automatically how to assess. Peer and Self Assessment need to be planned for in the day to day timetable.

Reflection:

2015

I was given a Fixed Term Position for term one and decided to continue my journey with Peer Assessment. My journey started with getting the students to reflect on their own learning first. This was new to them and required me to remind them about marking, fixing errors and then reflecting on what they were learning, what they did well and what they struggled with.

At the end of the term, working in pairs, the students had to present their PBL (Problem Based Learning) assignment to the class. Following this, feedback was given to them by me and then they needed to provide feedback to themselves about the process they followed and give a comment to their partner. My samples attached for 2015 so far, provided the students with prompts on what they were focussing on but no guidance from me was given. The overall comment provided to each peer suggests they still needed further guidance by me about what to provide feedback on. They needed to give more precise ideas on next steps of learning or development to their partners.

For term 2, I once again have a Fixed Term Position in another class. I will continue with Peer Assessment in this class, providing more guidance for what the student is to feedback to their partner, and compare the difference between the two classes.

2014

For the first half of 2014 I observed one student in particular regarding her ability to provide her peer with feedback. Her first attempt was based on Report Writing where she needed to mark her partners report on a particular spider and give her feedback. The only direction given was to focus on paragraphing, spelling, punctuation and if the sentences made sense. The feedback given was very basic and didn’t really provide the partner with much scope to be worked on. With further workshops provided based on Peer Feedback, you can see that the student providing the feedback becomes more precise on areas that were good and also the areas that require more work. More prompts were provided for the Peer Assessor to guide her. Through other observations not recorded here, it has also shown me the progress that both the Peer Assessor and Peer have made in their own efforts to improve in their work. I feel this is due to seeing errors made by others, one is able to identify errors in their own work and edit accordingly.

As a teacher this has taught me more about the type of feedback needed to be given to direct further learning to students. Prompts and guidelines are needed for students to use before they are able to provide critical feedback that promotes further learning to self and Peer.