Peer and Self Assessment: Promoting Learner Involvement and Personal Responsibility

Self and peer assessment

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The common situation is for these assessment procedures to appear in isolated modules, often not at level 1. Self and peer assessment procedures should be subject to particularly careful monitoring and evaluation from the tutor and students' point of view. It can take time for such procedures to run smoothly and for this reason, the initial involvement of relatively few marks - or solely formative assessment is wise.

Student feedback to the tutor on the procedure will be important. The use of peer and self assessment should be recognised as skill development in itself. Such procedures are not just another means of assessment but represent the development of self-appraisal, evaluative, analytical, critical and reflective skills.

These are important as employability skills and can be recognised in the learning outcomes of a module. Assessment criteria Sample Assessment Criteria for an Oral Presentation The following is a list of ideas for criteria for assessment of an oral presentation. The criteria may require more description in order to be better and more consistently understood by markers and in order to meet the expectations of the achievement at different levels. Audibility - Can you hear clearly throughout? Pace - Is the pace of the speech, or flow of ideas, too fast or too slow?

Fluency - Is the speech pattern fluent, indicating familiarity with the material and rehearsal of delivery?

Tone and Energy - Is there sufficient variation in tone? Does the presenter seem enthusiastic? Eye Contact - Is the presenter making eye contact across the audience and avoiding becoming note-bound? Does their movement and gesture enhance, not distract from, what they are saying? Appropriateness to the Audience - Is the content and approach relevant, interesting and engaging? Structure and Cohesion - Was the structure clearly outlined?

Is the order logical and easy to follow? Is it signposted throughout?

Is the balance of various elements effective? Use of Visual Aids - Is there a suitable amount? Are they easy to read? Do they effectively support the oral delivery?

Does the presenter use them competently? Is the breadth of the content sufficient? Is the depth of the content sufficient? Is the message clear? Is the argument consistent? Argument — Is there sufficient evidence to support arguments? Is there evidence of critical thinking? Are conclusions drawn effectively? Was the approach an original one? Was humour used to engage or persuade? Alongside criteria it can be useful to ask for identification of strengths and weaknesses and areas for improvement.

Sample Criteria for Assessment of Team Functioning The actual criteria picked for team or group work will depend on the purpose of the assessment. Sometimes the reason for assessment is to check that all of those involved in the group are contributing to the project in hand. Sometimes the focus is the ability of individuals to operate within a team as a specific skill. The most fundamental way of assessing group work is where a mark is given to each member of the group based on a single piece of work submitted by the group.

The main advantage of this for the tutor is that it reduces the time spent marking individual student scripts. If this approach is used for formative assessment, where the process of encouraging students to work in a group may be the main objective, then this method can be very effective. Potential problems may arise when it is used for summative assessment when students often resent other group members for not doing their fair share of the work and so contributing negatively to their own mark.

This can be overcome to an extent by making the students aware that they must ensure that all group members participate or by including an additional mark for individual effort. An extension to the method of requiring a single report from the whole group is to ask each team member to generate an anonymous peer mark for each individual member of their team.

In the first vignette, Ms. K is helping her students by painting the broad landscape so that they can see how their work fits into a wider context. She also reminds them of the criteria for quality work. Thus, she is helping them to develop a clear view of what they are to achieve and where they are going. At this stage, the view is usually clearer to the teacher than to the students. One of her responsibilities is to help the students understand and share the goals, which will become progressively clearer to them as the inquiry progresses. To chart student progress, Ms.

K relies on several strategies and sources: These opportunities are part of the natural flow of classroom life, indistinguishable for her and for the students from collecting data, discussing findings, planning next steps, drawing conclusions, and communicating findings about the main concepts they are expected to learn. In helping her students to reach their goal, she bases her actions on multiple pieces of evidence that she gleans from activities embedded in her teaching and curriculum. She uses this information to make decisions about work time, about support she needs to provide, and about resource suggestions.

She frames an assessment task in a way that will engage students to learn as they prepare for the final presentation and concert. Peer-design reviews, conversations, and other assessments were built into the activity of designing and building instruments so that students could draw from these to inform their design and construction of instruments. She provides the students with prompts and elements that should be included in their presentations so that the students will be clear on what is required. She has clear guidelines about the quality and depth of responses in terms of how students will demonstrate their understandings and skills.

The usefulness of assessment does not stop at teachers collecting information in the course of their teaching and providing feedback. R, they plan and structure specific assessment events, such as individual conferences with students, occasions for the students to write about a topic, design reviews, observations of students at work, presentations of work, and initiating whole-class discussion of what they have learned so far. These are just some of the many assessment activities and methods available to teachers and students. In these same scenarios, teachers could also have integrated the use of additional written assessments—including selected response, short answer, essay, lab reports, homework problems, among others —into their teaching in ways that would generate rich assessment opportunities.

Throughout this text, we have attempted to avoid technical terms whenever possible. When we do use them, we try to offer a definition or use it in a context where its meaning makes sense. Box provides operational definitions of several terms you will find in the assessment literature. Assessments that are different in form than traditional paper-and-pencil assessments. Assessments that allow students to demonstrate their understandings and skills to a teacher or an outsider as they perform a certain activity. They are evaluated by a teacher or an outsider on the quality of their ability to perform specific tasks and the products they create in the process.

The student is involved in selecting pieces of work and includes self-reflections of what understandings the piece of work demonstrates. Thus, criteria for selection and evaluation need to be made clear prior to selection. Assessments that require students to perform complex tasks representative of activities actually done in out-of-school settings.

Now, consider the assessment in the two vignettes in light of the following three guiding questions: Where are you trying to go? Where are you now? How can you get there? The goals articulated in the Standards arise from their emphasis on the active nature of science and their stress on the range of activities that encompass what it means to do science and to understand both specific concepts and the subject area as a whole. Thus, the Standards advocate going beyond the coverage of basic facts to include skills and thought processes, such as the ability to ask questions, to construct and test explanations of phenomena, to communicate ideas, to work with data and use evidence to support arguments, to apply knowledge to new situations and new questions, to problem solve and make decisions, and to understand history and nature of scientific knowledge NRC, To best assist students in their science learning, assessment should attend to these many facets of learning, including content understanding, application, processes, and reasoning.

The quality of any assessment depends first and foremost on the clarity and appropriateness of our definitions of the achievement target to be assessed We cannot assess academic achievement effectively if we do not know and understand what that valued target is. As Stiggins states, it is important that teachers have clear performance criteria in mind before they assess student work and responses.

R's guidelines included attention to both: Before the students engaged in the assessment, Ms. R had outlined how she would evaluate the student responses in each area. Clarity about the overall goals is only a first step. Given that goals are clear, the teacher has to help the students achieve greater clarity. This usually entails identification of somewhat discrete stages that will help the students to understand what is required to move toward the goal.

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These intermediate steps often emerge as the study progresses, often in lesson design and planning but also on the spot in the classroom as information about the students' levels of understanding become clearer, new special interests become apparent, or unexpected learning difficulties arise.

One of the goals of the Standards is for all students to become independent lifelong learners. The standards emphasize the integral role that regular self-assessment plays in achieving this goal. Students need the opportunity to evaluate and reflect on their own scientific understanding and ability. Before students can do this, they need to understand the goals for learning science.

The ability to self-assess understanding is an essential tool for self-directed learning. Yet, conveying to students the standards and criteria for good work is one of the most difficult aspects of involving them in their own assessment. Again, teachers can use various ways to help students develop and cultivate these insights. Following the example of Ms. K's class in the first vignette, students and teachers can become engaged in a substantive, assessment conversation about what is a good presentation, such as a good lab investigation or a good reading summary while engaging students in the development process of assessment rubrics.

K facilitates frequent conversations with her class about what constitutes good work. Although these discussions occur at the beginning of the project period, she regularly and deliberately cycles back to issues of expectations and quality to increase their depth of understanding as they get more involved in their projects. In discussions of an exemplary piece of work, she encourages the students to become as specific as possible. Over time, the students begin to help refine some of the criteria by which they will be evaluated. Such a process not only helps to make the criteria more useful; it increases their ownership of the standards by which judgments will be made about their work.

For her third graders, Ms. R provides guidelines for planning and presenting their instruments and introduces questions for the students to address as they engage in their work. Of course, the process is not quite so linear. It is not unusual for the goals to change somewhat as the students and teachers get more involved in the study. K's and Ms R's classrooms demonstrate the many ways assessment information can be obtained. In the first scenario, conferences with students allow Ms.

K to ask questions, hear specifics of project activity, and probe student reasoning and thought processes. She can get a sense of how and where the individuals are making contributions to their group 's work and help to ensure that they share the work at hand, including development of an understanding of the underlying processes and content addressed by the activity. The information she learns as a result of these conferences will guide decisions on time allocation, pace, resources, and learning activities that she can help provide.

After observations and listening to students discuss instruments, Ms. R made the judgment that her students were ready to continue with the activity. The journals prepared by Ms. K's students and the individual reflections of Ms. R's provided the teachers with an indication of their understanding of the scientific concepts they were working with, and thereby allowed them to gain new and different insights into their respective students' work.

The entries also provided the teachers with a mechanism, though not the only one, to gain some insight into the individual student's thinking, understanding, and ability to apply knowledge. K's class, the journal writing was regular enough that the teacher's comments and questions posed in response to the entries could guide the students as they revisit previous work and move on to related activities and reflections. Through such varied activities, the teachers in the vignettes are able to see how the students make sense of the data, the context into which they place the data, as well as the opportunity to evaluate and then assist the students on the ability to articulate their understandings and opinions in a written format or by incorporating understandings into a design.

As they walk around the room, listening, observing, and interacting with students, both teachers take advantage of the data they collect. Any single assessment is not likely to be comprehensive enough to provide high-quality information in all the important areas so that a student or teacher can make use of the data. K, for example, would not use the student conferences to obtain all the information she needs about student comprehension and involvement. She gets different information from reading student journals. In the individual reflections, Ms. R can get additional data to complement or.

The occasions to sit with, converse with, question, and listen to the students gave Ms. R the opportunities to employ powerful questioning strategies as an assessment tool. When teachers ask salient open-ended questions and allow for an appropriate window or wait time Rowe, —they can spur student thinking and be privy to valuable information gained from the response. Questions do not need to occur solely in whole-group discussion. The strategy can occur one-on-one as the teacher circulates around the room. Effective questioning that elicits quality responses is not easy.

In addition to optimal wait-time, it requires a solid understanding of the subject matter, attentive consideration of each student's remarks, as well as skillful crafting of further leading questions. In the vignette, Ms. K needed to be aware of the existence and causes of algal blooms in order to ask questions that may lead her students down productive paths in exploring them.

The close examination of student work also is invaluable, and teachers do it all the time. Continued and careful consideration of student work can enlighten both teacher and student. R in the vignettes, teachers are not concerned with just one dimension of learning. To plan teaching and to meet their students' needs, they need to recognize if a student understands a particular concept but demonstrates difficulty in applying it in a personal investigation or if a student does not comprehend fundamental ideas underlying the concept.

Specific information regarding the sources of confusions can be useful in planning activities or in initiating a conversation between students and the teacher. An array of strategies and forms of assessment to address the goals that the student and teacher have established allows students multiple opportunities to demonstrate their understandings.

This is important if we hope to support all students. A comprehensive understanding of science requires more than knowledge of scientific information and skills. The Standards articulate the breadth and depth of what it means to know and be able to do in science at different grade levels. To help ensure that assessment addresses and supports a broader view of science understanding, it can be helpful to consider the different dimensions that comprise knowledge in science. Some aspects of science knowledge are highlighted in Box With knowledge of the student's strengths, a teacher can help ensure that any particular assessment allows the student to demonstrate understanding and can assess whether information would be better gathered in a different format to allow for that opportunity to express thinking in different ways.

K collects her assessment data from a variety of places, including discussions, conversations, conferences, observations, journals and written work, in addition to providing useful information, relying on a variety of sources and using a variety of formats so as not to privilege any one way of knowing. The conferences she sets up and the conversations that ensue give her opportunities to probe understandings and confusions and reach students that may not be as articulate when it comes to written work.

Stiggins encourages teachers to devise classroom assessments of five different, but related, kinds of expectations:. In their work in science assessment, Shavelson and Ruiz-Primo attend to the following aspects of knowledge:. They, too, stress that different forms of assessment are better suited for different aspects of knowledge. This complexity is important to consider when developing a rich and comprehensive assessment system. Any classroom assessment system should assess and support growth in all areas.

A single type or form of assessment will not be able to capture all of the dimensions of scientific knowing and doing. Thus the form that assessment takes is significant. The form and content of assessment should be consistent with the intended purpose. Underlying this guideline is the technical notion of validity. Technical features are discussed later in this chapter. Validity centers on whether the assessment is measuring or capturing what it is intended to measure or capture. If content understanding is the goal, it is necessary to design an appropriate assessment that would tap into that dimension of their understanding.

If the ability to design an investigation is the goal, it is necessary to provide the opportunity for a student to demonstrate her ability to do such an activity. Validity is not, then, an inherent property of an individual assessment; rather, the interpretations drawn from the data and the subsequent actions that ensue are either valid or invalid. Choices for the form of the assessments are extensive and should be guided by the goals set for student learning. From Stiggins' book, Student-Involved Classroom Assessment, Figure offers questions to consider when designing, selecting, or implementing an assessment.

After first advising teachers to set clear and appropriate targets—or learning and performance goals—and convey these targets to their students, he stresses the importance of selecting appropriate methods and of taking care to avoid invalidity and bias. Effective formative assessment must be informed by theories to ensure that it elicits the important goals of science, including a student 's current understanding and procedural capability.

The elements of curriculum goals and methods of instruction come together, for part of the instructor's task is to frame subgoals that are effective in guiding progress towards curriculum goals. However, this can only be done in light of the teacher's beliefs about how best to help students to learn. This introduces learning theory in addition to assessment, but in formative assessment these are very closely intertwined.

Thus there has to be a conceptual analysis of the subject goals, which also is complemented by analysis of the cognitive capacities of the learners. Examples of issues that might arise are the choice between concrete but limited instances of an idea and abstract but universal presentations, the decision about whether to use daily experience or second-hand evidence, the complexity of the patterns of reasoning required in any particular approach, and research evidence about common misconceptions that hinder the progress of students in understanding particular concepts.

For additional information on these theoretical underpinnings, see NRC, a.

Here again, depth in a teacher's subject-matter knowledge is essential. Specifically, students often believe that a push or a pull—or a force—must be due to an active, or causal, agent. With this in mind, Minstrell carefully designs his instruction, including his questions and student experiences, to help them challenge their notions as they move towards a better understanding of the scientific phenomena and explanations involved with force.

After spending time discussing and drawing the forces involved as an object is dropped to the floor, he plans questions and activities to help cultivate student understandings of more passive actions of forces so they understand that the conceptual notion of force applies to both active and passive actions and objects.

His class discusses the forces involved with an object resting on a table, including the reasonableness of a table exerting an upward force. They go over other situations that would help them decide what is happening in terms of force,. Throughout the unit, the teacher listens carefully to his students' responses and explanations.

Without an understanding of both student learning and the science involved, upon hearing the proper terms from his students, he may have proceeded with his unit with the impression that the students shared a scientific understanding of force for a class transcript and analysis by the teacher, see Minstrell, The data produced from the variety of assessments illustrated in the vignettes are not only useful for the teachers but also as essential tools in helping students to realize where they stand in relation to their goals.

Thus for the students, the journals with the teacher 's comments added, serve as a repository for one form of feedback so they can maintain a continuing record of their work and progress. It is important to emphasize that assigning grades on a student' s work does not help them to grasp what it takes on their part to understand something more accurately or deeply. Comments on a student 's work that indicate specific actions to close the gap between the student's current understanding and the desired goal provide crucial help if the student takes them seriously.

There is well-researched evidence that grades on student work do not help learning in the way that specific comments do. The same research shows that students generally look only at the grades and take little notice of the comments if provided Butler, The opportunity that Ms. R's students had to design, build, and then rebuild instruments based on their trials gives them a chance to make good use of feedback to improve their piece of work. Providing information to students is not solely a cognitive exchange.

It is intertwined with issues of affect, motivation, self-esteem, self-attribution, self-concept, self-efficacy, and one's beliefs about the nature of learning. This is the distinction between feedback that emphasizes learning goals and the associated targets and feedback that focuses on self-esteem, often linked to the giving of grades and other reward and punishment schemes. Upon comparison of feedback in experimental studies, it is the feedback about learning goals that shows better learning gains. Feedback of the self-esteem type trying to make the student feel better, irrespective of the quality of the work leads less successful students to attribute their shortcomings to lack of ability.

The way in which information is provided is therefore a delicate matter. Grades, and even undue praise, can reinforce expectations of failure and lead to reluctance to invest effort. Yet this culture is deeply embedded in American schools and is hard to change. This fact highlights the importance of the nature and form of the information provided to students.

Thus, priority should be given to providing students with information that they can use to reach desired learning goals Ames, ; Butler, ; Dweck, In helping teachers and students establish where students stand in relation to learning goals, assessment activities are not only useful during and at the end of a unit of teaching, they also can be valuable at the start of a piece of work. Suitably open and nontechnical questions or activities can stimulate students to express how much they already know and understand about a topic. This may be particularly important when the students come from a variety of backgrounds, with some having studied aspects of the topic before, either independently or with other teachers in different schools.

Such assessment can both stimulate the thinking of the students and inform the teacher of the existing ideas and vocabularies from which the teaching has to start and on which it has to build. The following example from the Lawrence Hall of Science assessment handbook Barber et al. In this illustration, students are challenged to design and conduct two experiments to determine which of three reactants —baking soda, calcium chloride, and a phenol red solution phenol red and water —when mixed together produces heat.

The students already have completed an activity in which they mixed all three substances. The students are expected to refer to their observations and the results of that first activity. Box illustrates a data sheet used by the students for the assessment activity, which provides prompts to record their experimental design and observations. Through this investigation, the teacher would be able to assess students' abilities to do the following:. Design experiments that will provide information to help determine which reactants are necessary to produce the heat in this reaction. Record their experiments, results, and conclusions using chemical notation as appropriate.

Use experiment results and reasoning skills to draw conclusions about what causes heat. These students were able to arrive at some part of what would be a correct conclusion, though the degree to which the students used logical reasoning, or supported their conclusions with data, varied widely. Many came up with a correct solution but featured a noncontrol, inadequate experimental design.

In addition, the recording of results and observations was accomplished with varying degrees of clarity. Their responses, and the language they use to describe and explain observations and phenomena, suggest varying levels of understanding of the chemical and physical changes underlying the reactions. Because the assessment was designed primarily to tap scientific investigation and experimentation skills and understandings, other assessments, including perhaps follow-up questions, would be required to make inferences about their level of conceptual under-.

With close examination of the student work produced in this activity, teachers were able to gain insight into abilities, skills, and understandings on which they then could provide feedback to the student. It also provided the teacher with information for additional lessons and activities on chemical and physical reactions. Box , Box , Box , Box through Box offer samples of this type of student work along with teacher commentary.

Ongoing, formative assessment does not solely rely on a small-group activity structure as in the vignettes. In a whole-class discussion, teachers can create opportunities to listen carefully to student responses as they reflect on their work, an activity, or an opportunity to read aloud. In many classrooms, for example, teachers ask students to summarize the day's lesson, highlighting what sense they made of what they did. This type of format allows the teacher to hear what the students are learning from the activity and offers other students the opportunity of learning about connections that they might not have made.

In one East Palo Alto, California, classroom, the teacher asked two students at the beginning of the class to be ready to summarize their activity at the end. The class had been studying DNA and had spent the class hour constructing a DNA model with colored paper representing different nucleotide bases. In their summary, the students discussed the pairing of nucleotide bases and held up their model to show how adenine pairs with thymine and cytosine pairs with guanine. When probed, they could identify deoxyribose and the phosphate group by color, but they were not able to discuss what roles these subunits played in a DNA helix.

After hearing their remarks, the teacher realized that they needed help relating the generalizations from the model to an actual strand of DNA, the phenomenon they were modeling. Regardless of the format —individual, small group, whole class, project-based, written, or discussion—teachers have the opportunity to build in meaningful assessment. These opportunities should be considered in curriculum design. Student participation becomes a key component of successful assessment strategies at every step: Sharing assessment with students does not mean that teachers transfer all responsibility to the student but rather that assessment is shaped and refined from day to day just as teaching is.

For student self- and peer-assessment to be incorporated into regular practice requires cultivation and integration into daily classroom discourse, but the results can be well worth the effort. A teacher can facilitate this process by providing opportunities for participation and multiple points of entry, but students actually have to take the necessary action.

I conclude that the water and calcium chloride produce the most heat and the phenol red has nothing to do with making the heat, even though it got hot in the last experiment. Jonathan is very systematic in his approach. He first omits the baking soda and sees what would happen with a mixture of calcium chloride and phenol red. Based on his results, he correctly concludes that calcium chloride and phenol make heat. He next explores the effect of the phenol red as he substitutes water for phenol red solution and combines it with calcium chloride.

He makes the astute observation that this reaction is even hotter than the calcium chloride and phenol red solution and correctly concludes that phenol red does not create the heat. Rather, he states that water and calcium chloride produce the heat. Jonathan uses his own abbreviation for calcium chloride, C. It's possible that the P. We'd have to try mixing P. I think it would, but I still think that just means that water or a liquid like water is needed with C.

Stephanie first decides to omit the calcium chloride and combine phenol red and baking soda. When the reaction's results are cold, she correctly concludes that this mixture has nothing to do with the production of heat. However, she does not control variables in her next experiment, when she combines calcium chloride and water. Her decision is based on the following logical, though faulty reasoning: If phenol red and baking soda do not produce heat, perhaps the other two reactants will!

Technically, she should conduct another experiment so all variables are controlled. However, she considers this in her final conclusion when she discusses the possibility that mixing phenol red and calcium chloride which she didn't try would result in heat.

She speculates on the results of this reaction, and goes on to share reasoning for her ultimate conclusion—that water, or a liquid like water, is needed with calcium chloride to make heat. Given the limitation of the two experiments, the combination she first chose, and the fact that she is aware of the weakness of her experimental design, hers is a good handling of the results.

She implies that she would explore the unanswered questions if given an opportunity to conduct a third experiment. Like Jonathan, Stephanie uses chemical notation of some of her own abbreviations. He first omits baking soda and determines that the phenol red and calcium chloride produce heat. For his second experiment, he removes the phenol red from the original reaction and mixes baking soda, calcium chloride and water. It stayed pink but it got really hot. It didn't fizz and the bag didn't inflate. Emily substitutes water for phenol red in her first experiment.

She notices the reaction is hottest near the calcium chloride and thus concludes that the calcium chloride makes it hot. This is a good hypothesis, but not a valid conclusion at this point. A more correct conclusion, based on the experiment results, is that phenol red does not cause the heat.

Next, Emily combines phenol red and calcium chloride, a change of two variables in comparison to the last experiment. This new reaction also produces heat, but Emily does not conclude that baking soda is unnecessary for the heat. Rather, she states that calcium chloride needs a liquid to conduct heat. This conclusion is not based on experimental results, and it is only partially correct because aqueous liquids mixed with calcium chloride cause the heat. In addition, Emily's final conclusion calcium chloride causes the heat is incorrect because it omits the addition of water or a water-based liquid.

She also does not use chemical notation. Kelly at first substitutes water for phenol red. Her observations of the reaction are perceptive, but she is unable to reach a conclusion. She then chooses to mix calcium chloride and phenol red solution. While technically the variables are controlled between this experiment and the original reaction—baking soda becomes the test variable—Kelly's conclusion is that water and calcium chloride, or phenol red and calcium chloride, cause the heat.

These conclusions are not justified by her experiments nor is her final conclusion that water plus calcium chloride cause the heat.

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Her recording is minimal, though she does make an attempt to use chemical notation. In the opening vignette, students in Ms. K's class are drawing on a range of data sources, including their own and classmates' projects, library research, and interviews with local experts.

In preparation for presentations, the students are encouraged to make the connection of the small-scale study they do with plant fertilizer to the larger local system. Opportunities for revisions and regular discussions of what is good work help to clarify criteria as well as strengthen connections and analysis, thus improving learning. Class discussions around journal reflections provide important data for teachers about student learning and also allow students to hear connections others have made.

For this transition to occur, peerand self-assessment must be integrated into the student's ways of thinking. Such a shift in the concept of assessment cannot simply be imposed, any more than any new concept can be understood without the student becoming an active participant in the learning.

Reflection is a learned skill. Thus, the teacher faces the task of helping the student relate the desired ability to his or her current ideas about assessing one's self and others and how it can affect learning. How do students now make judgments about their own work and that of others? How accurate are these judgments? How might they be improved? Such discussions are advanced immeasurably through the examination of actual student work—initially perhaps by the examination of the anonymous work of students who are not members of the class. Involving students in their own and peer assessment also helps teachers share the responsibility of figuring out where each student is in relation to the goals or target and also in developing a useful plan to help students bridge the gap.

In addition to helping students learn how to learn, there are pedagogical payoffs when students begin to improve their ability to peerand self-assess. With a clearer vision of peer- and self-assessment and adequate time, teachers can get this help from their students and in the process help them to improve the quality of their own work. Although there is no one way to develop peer- and self-assessment habits in students, successful methods will involve students in all aspects of the assessment process, not solely the grading after an exercise is completed.

If students are expected to effectively participate in the process, they then need to be clear on the target and the criteria for good work, to assess their own efforts in the light of the criteria, and to share responsibility in taking action in the light of feedback. One method that has proved successful has been to ask students to label their work with red, yellow, or green dots. Red symbolizes the student's view that he or she lacks understanding, green that he or she has confidence, and yellow that there appear to be some difficulties and the student is not sure about the quality of the response.

These icons convey the same general meaning of traffic lights and are so labeled in the class. This simple method has proved to be surprisingly useful with the colored dots serving to convey at a glance, between student and teacher and between students and their peers, who has problems, where the main problems lie, which students can help one another, and so on. With a teacher's help, much useful work in student groups can start from assessment tasks: Such discussions inevitably highlight the criteria for quality. The teacher can help to guide the discussions, especially during the times in which students have difficulty helping one another.

Peers can discuss strengths and areas of weakness after projects and presentations. Much of the success of peer- and selfassessment hinges on a classroom culture where assessment is viewed as a way to help improve work and where students accept the responsibility for learning—that of their own and of others in their community.

R do in the snapshots of their respective classes, captured in the vignettes, teachers continually make decisions about both the teaching and the learning going on in their classrooms. They make curricular decisions and decide on experiences they think can help further students' understandings. They decide when and how to introduce and approach a concept and determine an appropriate pace. They continually monitor levels of interest and engagement in curricular activity. They attend to the individual student, the small group, and the class as a whole. If data are collected and used to inform the teacher and student, assessment can play a significant role in all the decisions a teacher makes about what actions to take next.

A focus on assessment cuts across multiple standards areas. Box shows how teaching standards seek to extend the purview of the teacher. The teacher is able to see whether students are struggling with an activity or concept, whether they have developed fundamental understandings, whether they need to revisit a particular idea or need more practice to develop particular skills.

Teachers need to understand the principles of sound assessment and apply those principles as a matter of daily routine practice. With the knowledge gained from assessment data, a teacher can make choices. Thus, assessment serves not only as a guide to teaching methods but also to selecting and improving curriculum to better match the interests and needs of the students. According to the Assessment Standards NRC, , planning curricula is one of the primary uses of assessment data. Teachers can use assessment data to make judgments about.

Thus assessment data can be used immediately, as Ms. K does when she alters upcoming plans, and Ms. R does when she decides her students are ready to move on to the next stage of activity. The data also are useful when the teachers cover the material again the following year. Teachers of science engage in ongoing assessment of their teaching and of student learning. In doing this, teachers.

Session - Peer and self-assessment - OER in Education

For the data to be useful in guiding instructional decisions, the assessment methods should be consistent with the desired pedagogy. Thus, assessment takes into consideration process as well as outcomes and products and the instruction and activities that lead to those ends. Only if assessments in science classrooms can more closely approximate the vision of science education teaching and learning can they inform the teacher's work in trying to implement the emphasis in the Standards on students actively doing science.

The extent to which any assessment data inform teaching and influence learning depends in a large part on use. Assessment-generated data do little good in the head of the teacher, in the grade book, or by failing to inform future decisions, such as selecting curricula, planning class time or having conversations with students. Teachers must use it to adapt their teaching to meet the needs of their students. In other words, just as teaching shapes assessment, assessment shapes teaching. The success of formative assessment hinges in large part on how the information is put to use.

With rich assessment data, a teacher can begin to develop possible explanations about what the difficulties might be for the student. If some pedagogical approach did not work the first time, is it likely to be more effective when repeated? Or, is some new approach required? Might other resources be provided? Setting subgoals is another strategy that is often effective. The student is encouraged to take smaller steps toward learning a particular concept or skill. Peer instruction is another approach that can sometimes work in helping students reach a learning or performance target.

Students occasionally can assist one another because they themselves may have overcome a similar difficulty. Most all teachers use this technique from time to time during class discussion when they encourage the entire group to help a student who clearly is having difficulty. The same principle can operate with just two students working cooperatively when one may have just figured out the desired response and can explain it to.

R brought in sixth graders to assist her third graders while they made instruments. Even though help was provided to handle materials and supplies, the older students also could have been more vocal in the design and construction of the instruments. Although teachers make assessments all the time, it is important that they develop a system for gathering data about student understanding and progress.

This way, no child is overlooked and teachers can be sure that they focus on what they think are the most important learning goals and outcomes. The specific system certainly can vary, depending on a teacher's experience and preferences in gathering such information. Relying on memory can be difficult with more than students, with many activities, interactions, and observations and over the course of many months before summative evaluations call for the use of such information.

One teacher might carry a clipboard while circulating around the room to record comments and observations. Each student has an index card on which to write questions or request an opportunity to speak with the teacher rather than to interrupt. Each day, the teacher observes a handful of students at work but this does not prevent the recording of information from conversations overheard in the room.

This method of collecting data not only helps to organize the teaching but also serves as pertinent information when talking with parents and students. In a review of the relevant research in this area, Fuchs and Fuchs reported that student achievement gains were significantly larger twice the effect size when teachers used a regular and systematic method for recording and interpreting assessment data and providing feedback as compared to when they made spontaneous decisions.

In addition to making good use of the data, keeping good records of day-to-day assessments also is important for summative purposes. When meeting with parents or students, it is helpful to have notes of concrete examples and situations to help convey a point. Good records also can serve to address issues of accountability, a topic that will be discussed in the next chapter. The Standards were written with the belief that all students should be expected to strive for and to achieve high standards. The corresponding principle in classroom assessment is clear: Assessment is equitable and fair, supporting all students in their quest for high standards.

Equity issues are difficult to grapple with and arise at all levels of the education system and in all components of any program. All participants—teachers, students, administrators, curriculum developers, parents—are called upon to share the belief that all students can learn, and this premise needs to infuse all aspects of classroom life.

Focusing on equity in classroom assessment is one part of the challenge. For years, assessment has been used to sort and place students in such a way that all students do not have access to quality science programs Darling-Hammond, ; Oakes, , Depending on the form assessment takes and how the ensuing data are used, assessment can be a lever for high-quality science education for all rather than an obstacle.

In research conducted by White and Frederiksen where students engaged in peer- and selfassessment strategies, traditionally low-attaining students demonstrated the most notable improvement.

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