Abstract:
This study investigated the accuracy of scores assigned by self-, peer-, and teacher assessors over time. Thirty-three English majors who were taking paragraph development course at Vali-e-Asr University of Rafsanjan and two instructors who had been teaching essay writing for at least two years at university, participated in the study. After receiving instructions on paragraph development, participants were trained for a session on how to rate the paragraphs. For three sessions the students were given topics to write about and were asked to rate their own and one of their peers’ papers for mechanics, grammar and choice of words, content development, and organization. The teachers also rated the paragraphs according to the same criteria. Multifaceted Rasch measurement was employed to analyze the data. The results showed different patterns of performance for the subjects rated by different raters at the beginning of the experiment. However, rater bias showed significant decrease across time. The results of the study have useful implications for language teachers especially in portfolio assessment where self and peer assessment provide invaluable help.
Machine summary:
Investigating the Effect of Self-, Peer-, and Teacher Assessment in Second Language Writing over Time: A Multifaceted Rasch Approach Sadollah Ravand M.
Introduction It is generally agreed that to assess student’s learning, proficiency, and knowledge, teachers need to use a range of assessments (Orsmond, Merry, & Pope, 2005; Reiling, 2000).
g. , Blue, 1994; Cheng & Warren, 2005; Falchikov & Goldfinch, 2000; Oscarson, 1989; Saito & Fujita, 2009; Topping, 2009) have enumerated indispensable values for self-, and peer-assessment.
In a study involving university students in Iran, Esfandiari and Myford (2013) compared severity of self-, peer-, and teacher- assessments in foreign language writing.
In a similar study, but in a different culture, Matsuno (2009) compared self-, and peer-assessments with teacher assessments in university writing classes.
Examining the characteristics of peer ratings of Japanese students, Saito and Fujita (2004) studied self-, peer-, and teacher assessments.
The finding that peer-assessors and teacher assessors have similarity in scoring and they have no correlation with self-assessors is consistent with studies of second language oral presentations (Patri, 2002; Yamashiro, 1999).
Lindblom-Ylänne, Pihlajamaki, and Kotkas (2006) compared the results of self-, peer-, and teacher assessment of student essays.
For example, comparing self-, peer-, and teacher assessment, our results support those of Esfandiari and Myford (2013) and Sullivan and Hall (1997), who like us, found that self-assessors tended to rate themselves more leniently.
It indicated that more rater training sessions and more writing samples over more occasions can result in little bias in self-, and peer- assessment.