peer assessment
Several student teachers researched forums and peer feedback.
Forums with Year 7
The first student teacher looked at using a VLE discussion forum to support Year 7 ICT peer assessment. The study took place over three lessons with pupils who had little experience of peer assessment or using a VLE for this type of task before. The students uploaded their work on a discussion thread shared it with given a pupil from a different group who was in another room. They were instructed to mark the work against a given set of levelled criteria, commenting on three good points and suggesting three areas for improvement. These were uploaded for the original pupil access for homework. The teacher was able to access these 'feedbacks' to check for misunderstandings and review feedback. The pupils were able to make improvements to their work and discuss with their teacher.
The student teacher commented: Pupils enjoyed the activity, felt it was useful in their learning, and would like to do activities like this more often. The teachers involved also felt it was valuable and did not consume too much lesson time. It was a useful way of being able to review pupil learning and progress through the discussions they had on the forum.
Forums with Year 13
Adam set up a forum in Moodledo for Y13 students. As a coursework task students were creating helpsheets on using more advanced features of Excel. These notes are taken from his case report
What I did
I set up a forum view and comment on each other's work.
Imonitored the forum though feltas this was a relatively small class of mature students I did not expect and did not find inappropriate messages. Over a week each student mailed their help sheets and did receive some feedback. Participation was heavily differentiated - some students really got into it but others did not.
What was valuable about this forum?
I did feel that students did ask and respond to each other rather than asking more as the main source of information
I could access their tasks and work in progress and I could do this whenever I liked
They could in fact easily share
What would I do differently?
I would set up an example to get them started eg an exemplar message and attachment
I would begin this earlier as by the time the forum got going the placement finished.
Peer assessment
Sarah was interested in how effective using a VLE for formative peer assessment with year 7 ICT groups would be and whether it would ‘help make peer assessment more effective and reduce the burden on teacher and lesson time’. She found that the school used peer partners and group assessment but wanted to get feedback from teachers in the school before going any further. She interviewed three teachers about their current peer assessment and found:
Teacher 1 did use peer assessment but says time taken was a problem and believed no real benefits for pupils so no longer does it.
Teacher 2 not use peer assessment and believed pupils should have maximum time on computers to develop technical skills and as the school focused on grading they did not feel that there was enough time to deviate from this. There would also be a problem if with pupils moving around room.
Teacher 3 uses peer assessment regularly, including using exemplar work with the whole group, but insisted criteria should be graded.
Pupils were asked about peer assessment and commented that it helped them to understand how the assessment criteria were applied so they could make changes to their work. It also helped them realised that other people made the same mistakes. They mostly liked to discuss their work and exchange ideas, but they did not like people being negative about their work or students not taking the activity seriously. For some quieter pupils the partnering was important. Some pupils responded that they did not like their work being used with the whole group.
Sarah believed that using a VLE for discussion would allow discussion to extend beyond the classroom and involve others not in that class. It would also allow reflection beyond the lesson and could revisit feedback they have given and received while carrying out an assignment. She saw the role of the teacher evolving - as an overseer, providing minimum intervention in the feedback cycle before having a discussion with the students. She only had a limited time to trial developments in her school and she encounter difficulties as well as opportunities, summing up she felt 'when it went well pupils got much more detailed feedback than usual and from different sources' but simply using the technology was not going to make pupils more skilled or more willing to undertake this kind of exercise.' She understood much more the doubts her teacher colleagues had about peer assessment but saw that it was worth continuing with both online and face to face as it really did help pupils 'know from the inside' how their work was being assessed.