Peer Assessment Essay

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Student peer assessment Stephen Bostock Summary Student assessment of other students' work, both formative and summative, has many potential benefits to learning for the assessor and the assessee. It encourages student autonomy and higher order thinking skills. Its weaknesses can be avoided with anonymity, multiple assessors, and tutor moderation. With large numbers of students the management of peer assessment can be assisted by Internet technology. Biography Stephen Bostock FSEDA is Director for IT, Department of Computer Science, at Keele University, where he is also an Academic Staff Developer. After an initial career as a biologist, he developed interests in learning technology and then staff development. Keywords Peer assessment, self-assessment, ownership, authentic assessment, reliability, validity, web-based formative assessment Introduction Peer assessment is assessment of students by other students, both formative reviews to provide feedback and summative grading. Peer assessment is one form of innovative assessment (Mowl, 1996, McDowell and Mowl, 1996), which aims to improve the quality of learning and empower learners, where traditional forms can by-pass learners' needs. It can include student involvement not only in the final judgements made of student work but also in the prior setting of criteria and the selection of evidence of achievement (Biggs, 1999, Brown, Rust and Gibbs, 1994). Peer assessment can be considered part of peer tutoring (Donaldson and Topping, 1996). As with other forms of peer tutoring, there can be advantages for both tutor and tutee (Hartley, 1998, 135). Topping (1996, 7) describes the potential advantages of peer tutoring, including the development of the skills of evaluating and justifying, and using discipline knowledge. Self and peer-assessment are often combined or considered together. They have many potential advantages
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