Guiding Self and Peer Assessment – Two Technologies

Self and Peer writing assessments can be very powerful tools in the classroom.  This type of an assignment can aid students in improving their editing and writing skills.   Through Peer Assessment students learn to collaborate and provide constructive peer criticism. However implementing this type of review assignment in a classroom setting can be a rather daunting task as self and peer review activities can be time consuming and often it is noted that students do not have the necessary tool set to evaluate writing and provide constructive feedback.  The skills necessary to preform self and Peer assessments are often categorized as metacognative skills which can be difficult for students to master without guidance.  So how do we provide this guidance to students?  Here are two technology suggestions!

The Self and Peer Assessment tool, available to you in your myWPI (BlackBoard) site:

The Self Evaluation tool students use instructor establish criteria to review and grade their own assessments. Through Self Evaluation students learn to better understand their own strengths and weaknesses. With the Peer Assessment tool, students can review the work of others in the class. Instructor established criteria is used as a basis for student comments on their peer’s assignments. With both of these tools the instructor established criteria is central to the assessment process.  Through the establishing of well defined criteria with examples we can guide the evaluation process and aid students in mastering the metacognitive task at hand.

Want more information on this tool:  Email us at myhelp@wpi.edu or visit: http://www.wpi.edu/+myhelp/selfandpeerassessment.html

Student Response Systems (SRS) or Clickers –

This recent post, Using Clickers to Facilitate Peer Review in a Writing Seminar, in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog ProfHacker gave some great suggestions for using SRS for peer review!  We think this is a novel and unique way to present peer review to students!  Using SRS to guide peer review not only helps to guide students through the process of learning how to preform peer review but also facilitates discussion amongst the students.  Discussion on why a paper does or does not meet criteria further reinforces the metacognitive review process.

Want more information on this tool:  Email us at atc-ttl@wpi.edu or visit: http://www.wpi.edu/Academics/ATC/Collaboratory/HowTo/CPS/


Further Reading:

Keith Topping
Peer Assessment Between Students in Colleges and Universities; Review of Educational Research Fall 1998 68: 249-276, doi:10.3102/00346543068003249

Jianguo Liu, Dawn Thorndike Pysarchik, William W. Taylor
Peer Review in the Classroom; BioScience Vol. 52, No. 9 (Sep., 2002), pp. 824-829 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1314171

Nancy Falchikov, Judy Goldfinch
Student Peer Assessment in Higher Education: A Meta-Analysis Comparing Peer and Teacher Marks; Review of Educational Research Vol. 70, No. 3 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 287-322 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1170785