Peer Assessment At The Heart Of Formative Assessment Essay

Assessment is carried out to evaluate that learning has taken place. It measures the learner’s attainment of knowledge and skills in their particular learning area. Assessment encourages learners to ask questions on anything they have not fully understood, as learners know that they will have to prove their knowledge and understanding during assessment to the standards of the awarding body.

The term ‘formative assessment’ is used to describe the activities and processes used by teachers and learners to gather information that informs future teaching and learning. Assessment becomes formative if the information gathered is used as feedback to adapt and modify teaching and learning (Black and Wiliam, 1998, p.2). There are a variety of different methods and techniques that can be used by teachers and learners that can contribute to enhancing learner progress. These include

A common goal, hopefully not detested by many instructors, is to improve the learning experience for the student. Feedback is a crucial factor in improving student’s learning experience and students have shown that feedback that uses a combination of strategies can even improve the relationship between a student and a teacher (Crimmins et al., 2014). Student feedback is important to students and impacts academic achievement. Feedback is not only valued by the teacher to help assess grades, but students report liking receiving feedback. Students feel that the learning experience is enhanced by feedback that is motivating and related to future successful writing performance (Marrs, 2016; Zumbrunn, Marrs, & Mewborn, 2016).Further, positive feedback has been linked to

The artifacts reveal the use of self assessments and peer assessment in a classroom environment. The use of self and peer assessment allows the students to place responsibility upon themselves. This artifact is documentation of a lesson taught during my two-week internship in Alabaster City Schools. The internship was with an ESL Summer Camp, pertaining to third-grade students.

In order to assess Lucy’s progress in writing, I analyzed a sample piece of her opinion writing worksheets. Each student in Mrs. McDonald’s kindergarten listened to Mrs. McDonald read them the book, “ The Mixed Up Alphabet” by Steve Metzger. The students were guided through a worksheet that outlined who to write to, what their opinion was, a reason why, and whom it was from. This writing piece was given during a single writing period, which consists of 30 minutes of individual work time. I was able to conference with Lucy during her writing process. She was able to tell me what her opinion was on the book they read and why. She was able to initially decide what she was writing without a prompt from me. To assess her writing, I collected the outlined sheet of her writing.

Assessment is all about making judgements. A major argument for involving students in self and peer-assessment is that it helps them to develop the ability to make judgements, in particular about themselves and their work. This is an important life skill as well as an academic one.

Students are instructed on how to develop and organize their writing by developing a plan or out line to follow. Teachers should discuss with their students how to effectively plan out their writing strategy. Students need to be taught to question themselves about the purpose of their writing. Questions like; “Who am I writing for?” or “How will I organize my thoughts?” are two general examples. Gersten mentions the importance and purpose of the first draft and how it provides a concrete reminder for where the writing is going. The plan and its draft provide a common language for teacher and students to share making communication easier. He also speaks of the strengths of the revision process. Gersten illustrates how peer-editing can be a useful tool to employ during writing.

To conclude, the idea of teaching writing with CALL definitely offers much in the way of learning value. Particularly the concept of giving feedback to a learner in a variety of approaches gives more potential for learning than previously ever predicted. The many different forms of feedback discussed in this assignment isolate different learning methods and responses from a student. There are two studies that look specifically into how effective online learning environments are and both indicated that automated feedback adds significance to student writing, although students do not appear to enjoy the process as much as being in a classroom. These studies identify two important points, that learning how to write should be engaging and that other real people tend to make it more so. Of these two studies, one was a huge data sample and one was

Logan Pearsall Smith once said, “Fine writers should split hairs together, and sit side by side, like friendly apes, to pick the fleas from each other’s fur.” All be it an overwhelmingly disgusting image, Smith’s words are true when it comes the art and science of putting pencil to paper. In the classroom, students should be able to be vulnerable, honest, accountable and “real” in their writing so that they may grow to become better writers. It is the responsibility of the teacher to insure a quality learning environment that is conducive to these three factors. Observing the writing process and identifying the experiences within, be them personal, direct or indirect, contribute to how the educator teaches students using best practices.

| Its time consumingYou might not get anything out of the observation.Example: you could be there observing for an hour and all that might have happened is the learner served one customer.

What was my reaction to the peer assessments? More than anything I was pleasantly surprised. I got a better rating and assessment than I thought I would.

Whether formative assessment is the best method to be used to assess students, can a particular method of assessing students have an impact in students’ learning, is teacher’s role in assessing students’ important for students learning and does students’ voice and formative assessment have any relation in enhancing students learning, are some questions that I want to get crystal clear answers for and look into with keen interest to find out whether students learning is enhanced through formative assessment. Hence in this essay I will be digging into, a descriptive, a critical and a reflective deep look through my own experiences, researches and theories in the related field on the questions or issues mentioned above to find out whether formative assessment in real enhances students’ learning. The main focus of this essay is the urge of finding out whether formative assessment in real enhance students learning. With the high hope of applying and practicing every little bit of information that I compile from the readings into the current practices in any correlated

Chen (2004) also examined the effect of peer correction on the EFL writing or junior high school students. They were divided into a control or an experimental group. Students in the control group and did not have peer correction. The results showed that peer correction improved students' writing with respect to content and organization because the peer correction activity gave them more ideas and encouraged them to write more.

I believe it is important for any student who wants to do their best in a class to take a moment to evaluate their own work to determine the rate their writing is progressing and how they can continue to advance their writing. When I looked through my own work I asked myself “what have I learned this semester?” and “what do I still need to learn in order to improve my writing?”. Answering both these questions will help me with my last step of my self-evaluation, developing a plan to learn new skills.

In some courses you will be allowed or encouraged to form study groups, to work together in class generating ideas, or to collaborate on your thinking in other ways. Even in those cases, it's imperative that you understand whether all of your writing must be done independently, or whether group authorship is permitted. Most often, even in courses that allow some collaborative discussion, the writing or calculations that you do must be your own. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't collect feedback on your writing from a classmate or a writing tutor; rather, it means that the argument you make (and the ideas you rely on to make it) should either be your own or you should give credit to the source of those