“Assessment is the single most powerful influence on learning” (Boud, Cohen & Sampson, 1999, p.413).

All assessment impacts on children’s’ learning however, our recent seminar focused on formative assessment. Formative assessment can be defined as a cyclical process in which teachers share responsibility with their students about their learning. This can be carried out through various assessment strategies including sharing learning goals, effective questioning, self and peer evaluation and valuable feedback.  From these four key assessment strategies the teacher can modify their teaching to enrich their pupils’ learning. Therefore, formative assessment creates an environment for in-depth thinking rather than rote learning. (Clark, 2005,p.5; Heritage, 2010, p.7; Cowie and Bell, 1998,p.1; Black and Wiliam, 1998).

(The cycle of assessment)

Although, as mentioned above, all forms of formative assessment are valuable, due to my KS2 experiences on placement, this blog will consider self and peer assessment and evaluate the potential challenges within these forms of assessment.

I witnessed a range of self-assessment strategies from thumbs up or thumbs down, pupils traffic lighting their work, to children writing a comment about their learning in a purple pen. Self-assessment inevitably allows a pupil to consider their progress in relation to their learning objectives (Black and Wiliam, 1998, p.6). However, one challenge I noticed was when pupils were traffic lighting or writing a comment about their work they focused on the complexities of the task rather than the intended learning outcome. Hence, their self- assessment became a rather futile exercise (Black and Wiliam, 1998, p.6; Clark, 2005, p.114). This may have been due to my lack of reminding them or because of the way the learning objective was delivered. My school operated a whole-school system of children writing a “Can I” statement in their books as the lesson’s learning intention. Although, this was effective in highlighting the learning objective, it could also be seen as a repetitive and tedious exercise. Whereas, in hindsight, they could have generated their own success criteria, for example, by looking at their next steps or evaluating a well-written model of text and discovering the features (Clark, 2005, p.9). Furthermore, as discussed in our recent seminar the learning intention could have been delivered in different parts of the lesson rather than at the start and the plenary. This, in turn, should aid pupil’s self-assessment because they are constantly referring back to the learning objectives rather than just focussing on the difficulties of the task.

This issue overlapped into peer assessment, where pupils made general comments on their peer’s work rather than relating comments to the learning intention. The main form of peer assessment I witnessed was verbal. Frequently, a child would read aloud a piece of work and the class commented with praise or constructive input.  Considering, Vygotsky and other social constructivists argue that learning is ingrained and expanded on through peer interaction, peer assessment is vital in the classroom (Shepard, 2000). However, peer assessment has to be carefully managed so that pupils do not see this process as humiliating or punishing. Hence, a learning environment has to be created where all pupils’ opinions are valued and peer feedback is seen as insightful rather than critical (Shepard, 2000; Clark, 2005, p.114). This takes careful consideration and class management by the teacher. My class teacher used to reward constructive feedback and ask the original pupil if they agreed with their peer’s evaluation. In my own teaching practice, I aim to develop an insightful culture to ensure my pupils can effectively learn from each other.

Therefore, in my future practice, to ensure self and peer assessment are valuable I need to enable children to understand the learning intention by delivering it in inventive ways so peer and self-assessment are against criteria rather than random exercise. Furthermore, my classroom culture should encourage feedback through praise and suggested improvements over harsh criticality.

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References

Boud, D., Cohen, R. and Sampson, J. (1999) Peer learning and assessment. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 24(4), pp.413-426.

Clarke, S. (2005) Chapter 1 in formative assessment in Action: Weaving the Elements Together. London: Routledge.

Heritage, M. (2010) Formative assessment: making it happen in the classroom, London: SAGE.