Self-assessment and Peer Assessment

Post date: Mar 28, 2017 3:23:12 PM

By: Mark Jason T. Perez, HT II - COBNHS

Self-assessment

Student’s assessment is a powerful strategy for couple of reasons. It can help student’s self-regulation skills and build their ability to become independent because they have this self-monitoring learning. But as teachers we just don’t have the time to deal with an individual assessment maybe because we have a lot of students. So, we sometimes try to ask them to conduct their own self-assessment. The strategy that I know that really works is giving them a checklist, it has four columns in each page. They need to write their activities before, during and after and provide their own evaluation after the self-assessment on the fourth column. Deciding on the solution after encountering conflicts is a big training for them to come up with a good judgement after their self-assessment.

I know as a teacher, I have to think of better strategies to meet the need of my students. I should embrace some strategies from the published studies of experts on the field. According to John B. Biggs an Australian educational psychologist (2003), keys to successful learning is the aligned curriculum. This means that learning outcomes are clear, learning experiences are designed to assist student achievement of those outcomes, and carefully designed assessment tasks which allow students to demonstrate achievement for those outcomes.

Giving them clear rubrics or criteria and opportunities to revise, improve, modify their works not just at the end of the task; but also during the process of self-assessment, is a good strategy. Telling them how fundamental it is with clear and explicit instruction can lead to a successful SA (self-assessment).

Peer Assessment

This definition from Falchkov (1995) is what I follow every time I ask my students to do the peer assessment, when the students have given their feedbacks to other works.

“Falchikov (1995) defines peer assessment as the process through which groups of individuals rate their peers. (Dochy et al,1999). Peer assessment is an arrangement for learners to consider and specify the level, value, or quality of a product or performance of other equal – status learners. Products to be assessed can include writing, oral presentations portfolios, test performance, or other skilled behaviors.

One peer assessment that I provide most of the time is I grouped them and give them scoring rules, clear instruction, and practice with examples for reliable feedback. The learners will be given a scoring sheet and start to recite for example the Trigonometric Identities. After the activity, they will start giving their feedbacks before during and after the activity. Then evaluation follows.