Week 8 Blog - Great Job A+ (Peer and Formative Assessment)

Many thanks to Kathleen Stewart, DC faculty and UOIT MEd grad, for sharing her insights and experiences regarding peer assessment (Kathleen's UOIT MEd project topic).  The peer and formative assessment challenges and solutions below are a result of our conversation, readings, and discussions with other colleagues...

Challenges

Have you ever worked in a group and ended up with more than your share of work?  Teachers often employ peer assessments for grading purposes as an attempt to even out the unfair workload, but these peer assessments need to be honest and impactful (not just students giving other students all A+).

Collecting and re-distributing anonymous (confidential) peer assessment forms, and adding layers of self-assessment feedback and teacher feedback can be tedious, time-consuming, and complex.

Students feel they don't have the skills to evaluate peers..."I don't know how to evaluate, I'm not the teacher".

Students don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, the friendship dynamic kicks in.  Often their evaluations are limited to "great job", "well done", "contributed a lot".

Students don't see any purpose for evaluating each other.

Solutions

Start by convincing students of the value of peer and formative assessment.  How?

• Show specific examples (exemplars) of how the peer assessment process can improve work (and student results) from real student work in previous classes.  Consider including real-life performance evaluations as samples.
• Discuss patterns:  if feedback is consistent throughout several assessments, that is more valuable than single stand-alone comments.
• Define how to create a collaborative, participatory intellectual community as described in the Edutopia article Conversing, Consulting, and Creating.  
• Describe specific examples of the same article's value-adds (make your examples relevant to their assignment):
• Sharing Ideas in Process
• Seek to Understand and Support
• Decentralizing Authority and Knowledge
• Finding Inspiration and Models

Embrace anonymity in the process.  Protect identities.  It creates more honest feedback.

Provide specific questions.

• What percentage of the workload did this group member contribute? (with drop-down menu of percentages)
• Describe the role this group member played within the team dynamic.
• Describe the group member's attendance and contribution at group meetings.
• Describe the quality of work the group member submitted.
• Suggest an improvement and explain how it improves.
• Describe a strength and explain why it's a strength.

For formative assessment purposes, have two (or more) assessment cycles - one part-way through the project, to allow time for students to correct and improve on their work, and one at the end evaluating the final finished product.  Depending on the size and scope of the project, two interim assessments may work well.  Alternatively, you could try assigning one group to evaluate another group's work, as an interim and formative step.

Consider allowing students to choose if they want to work in a group, or as an individual.  While not always possible, being able to choose themselves is appreciated.  FYI usually about 1/3 of my students prefer to work in groups, while the other 2/3 work alone.  I do tell students that if they choose to work in a group, they're all receiving the identical grade, so make your choice carefully.

Online peer and formative assessments

How about a free digital tool?  One freely available software tool called Teammates provides templates with guiding questions provided for you as a starting point.  Teammates creates forms for anonymous (and confidential) peer feedback, along with teacher comments, all shareable and easily tailored to your needs.  This looks like a great tool to manage peer assessments!