Self and Peer Assessment

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Assessing Learning Topic: Critique of Assessment tool The last decades have witnessed a huge change in the way learning and the learning process are perceived, particularly from seeing students as the objects to the ones who can build their own knowledge base upon which they rely to interpret the world around them. Such a shift in viewpoint has led to the rethinking of the nature of assessment, ‘a process of collecting data for the purpose of making decisions about individuals and groups’ as defined by Salvia and Ysseldyke (2001, p.5). Language assessment, being a significant branch of assessment, has proved to be beneficial in a number of ways, involving a variety of different types, the three primary of which are selected-response, constructed-response and personal-response assessments. Even though each kind has both advantages and disadvantages, it is the personal-response assessment that seems to gain more and more concern and generates many debates among educationalists. In this essay, I am going to analyze the two particular types of personal-response assessments, namely self- and peer language assessments by first exploring their nature, then their good points and the problematic issues they have raised. First, it is important to have a clear understanding of what is self- and peer language assessment prior to giving any judgment on the two. Self-assessments are the ones that ‘require students to rate their own language, whether through performance self-assessments, comprehension self-assessments, or observation self-assessments’ (Brown & Hudson, 1998 p.652). As such, the nature of self- assessments is to have students engaged in their learning as well as trigger their own reflection on what they have acquired. Consequently, it is often seen as: A continuous longitudinal process, which activates and integrates the learner’s prior knowledge and reveals
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