LE14

Welcome to Learning Event 14 (#LE14): 🎯

Leveraging Peer and Self-Assessment 🌟

Learning Event 14 explores strategies for incorporating peer and self-assessment into courses to foster reflection, collaboration, and metacognitive skills. These practices encourage students to take ownership of their learning and develop critical thinking abilities through evaluation and constructive feedback.

Why It Matters

Traditional assessments often emphasize teacher-led evaluation, limiting opportunities for students to engage actively in the assessment process. Incorporating peer and self-assessment:

• Encourages students to reflect on their work and learning processes.
• Develops collaboration and feedback skills.
• Supports metacognitive growth and self-regulation.

These approaches empower students to become active participants in their learning journey.

Focus

Peer and Self-Assessment:
Assessment strategies where students evaluate their own or their peers' work, fostering accountability and deepening understanding of course content and objectives.

Key Concepts:

1. Benefits and Challenges:

   • Benefits: Promotes reflection, enhances collaboration, and provides diverse perspectives.
   • Challenges: Requires clear guidelines to ensure constructive and fair feedback.

2. Structuring Activities for Feedback:

   • Provide detailed rubrics or guidelines for evaluating work.
   • Scaffold feedback with sentence starters or question prompts.
   • Encourage positive, specific, and actionable comments.

3. Encouraging Self-Assessment and Growth:

   • Guide students to evaluate their progress against course objectives.
   • Integrate self-assessment into reflective journaling or goal-setting activities.
   • Foster a growth mindset by focusing on improvement over perfection.

READ 📖

1. Peer Assessment – Cornell Center for Teaching Innovation
   “Peer assessment encourages students to develop a critical eye and improves their ability to evaluate the quality of their own work.”

2. A Practical Review for Implementing Peer Assessments Within Teams – Yang, Brown, Gilmore, & Persky
   “To use peer assessments most beneficially, instructors must define the purpose for their use, explain the purpose of teamwork, orient students to the tool being used, assess teamwork over time, provide feedback, minimize grades associated with the assessment, and use partial anonymity when collecting feedback.”

3. Using peer assessment as an effective learning strategy in the classroom – Stuart Boon
   “Peer assessment can be a powerful learning strategy if students are adequately prepared for it and have been guided to develop key interpersonal skills.”

WATCH 🎥

1. Empowering Students to Own the Assessment Process (3:52)
2. Feedback on Learning (3:17)
3. The Power of Feedback (23:29)

DISCUSS 💬

How can peer and self-assessment foster deeper learning in your courses? What challenges might arise, and how could you address them?

DO ✍️

Design a Peer Assessment Activity

Steps:

1. Identify an assignment or project suitable for peer assessment.
2. Develop clear rubrics or guidelines for evaluation.
3. Model effective feedback with examples.
4. Facilitate the activity and provide students with feedback on their evaluations.

Develop a Self-Assessment Tool

Steps:

1. Identify key learning objectives for your course.
2. Create a tool (e.g., checklist, rubric, or reflective journal prompt) that allows students to evaluate their progress.
3. Encourage students to set personal goals based on their self-assessment.

Self-Check:

• Are the criteria clear and aligned with learning objectives?
• Does the activity promote reflection and actionable feedback?
• How will you support students in developing effective evaluation skills?

Share Your Work!

We’d love to hear about how you incorporated peer and self-assessment in your teaching. Email us at hello@digitallyliterate.net to share your experiences!