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Self- and Peer-Assessment is the process of students or their peers grading assignments or tests based on a teacher’s benchmarks. The reasons that teachers employ Self- and Peer-Assessment are that it will save them time, students may gain a better understanding of the material, and student’s metacognitive skills may increase. Rubrics are often used in conjunction with Self- and Peer-Assessment.

Logistics
By employing Self- and Peer-Assessment teachers can more effectively manage their time. Having students grade each other’s papers results in a more efficient classroom setting.

Saves Teacher Time
Having a student grade assignments can save teacher’s time and that is the reason some teachers implement this as part of their class. Teacher’s time is saved because an entire classroom can be grading at one time. All the papers can be graded in the time it would take the teacher to grade one. Also rather than having a teacher rush through each paper students are able to take their time to correct them. Students can spend more time on a paper because they only have to grade one and thus can do a more thorough job.

Quicker Feedback
Having students grade papers in class will decrease the time it takes students to get back assignments. Instead of having students wait for feedback on their work Self- and Peer-Assessment allows assignments to be graded soon after completion. Students won’t have to wait until they have moved onto new material and the information is no longer fresh in their minds to receive feedback.

Pedagogical
Students can learn from grading others papers. Often teachers do not go over test answers and give students the chance to learn what they did wrong. Self- and Peer-Assessment is a way that teachers can help students to know what mistakes they made. Students will get to see right in front of them what the correct answers are and what they did wrong. This will improve later work and deepen student’s understanding. Reading their own answers will allow students time to ponder information and may lead to a better understanding. In a study by Sadler and Good they showed that students who self-graded their tests did better on later tests. The students could see what they had done wrong and were able to fix it on later assignments. After peer grading students did not necessarily get higher results.

Metacognitive
Through Self- and Peer-Assessment students are able to see mistakes in their thinking and can correct it for future assignments. By grading papers students are better able to understand the grading process and can understand their own strengths and weakness. Students learn how to think while completing assignments. Students will learn better test taking strategies. By grading assignments students may be able to learn how to complete assignments more accurately and how to test better.

Three professors Lin-Agler, Moore, and Zabrucky conducted an experiment where they found “that students are able to use their previous experience from preparing for and taking a test to help them build a link between their study time allocation.” The students were better able to know how to study for a test after participating in Self- and Peer-Assessment. Also by increasing metacognitive thinking teachers are preparing students for professional practices of evaluating others.

Attitude
If Self- and Peer-Assessment is implemented students can come to see tests not as punishment but as useful feedback. Hal Malehorn says that by using peer evaluation classmates can work together for “common intellectual welfare.” That it can create a “cooperative atmosphere” for students instead of one where students fight for grades.

However, in the Supreme Court Case Owasso Independent School District v. Falvo, the school was sued because a son was picked on when other students learned that he got a low score. Malehorn is trying to show the idealized version of what Peer-Assessment can do for the attitude of a classroom. In practice, situations where students are put down can result as seen by those found in the Supreme Court Case.

Teacher Grading Agreement
One concern about Self- and Peer-Assessment is that students may grade easier than teachers. Teachers want to decrease grading time but not at the cost of losing accuracy.

Support For
A study by Saddler and Good shows that there is a high level of agreement between grades assigned by teachers and students as long as students are able to understand what quality the teacher wants. They also say that teacher grading can be more accurate as a result of using Self- and Peer-Assessment. If teachers look at what students graded themselves then they have more information so they can assign a more accurate grade.

Support Against
However, Saddler and Good warn that there is some disagreement. They suggest that teachers implement some kind of system to moderate students grading to catch bad student grading. Another study reported that grade inflation did occur. Students tended to grade themselves higher than the teacher would. This would suggest that this is not an accurate method of grading since results diverge from true results.

How they Compare
According to the study by Saddler and Good students that are peer grading tend to undergrade and students that are self grading tend to overgrade. However, a large majority of students do get within 5% of the teacher’s grade. Relatively few self graders undergrade and relatively few peer graders tend to overgrade.

Rubric Purpose
For students to be able to grade more open ended questions they need some criteria to follow. These often come in the form of rubrics, which lay out different objectives and how much each is worth when grading. Rubrics are often used for writing assignments.

Examples of Objectives
1.Expression of Idea

2.Organization of Content

3.Originality

4.Subject Knowledge

5.Content

6.Curriculum Alignment

7.Balance

8.Voice

Group Work
One area that Self- and Peer-Assessment is being applied is in group projects. Teachers can give projects a final grade but how do they determine what grade each individual in the group deserves. Students can grade their peers and individual grades can be based on these assessments. There are problems with this grading method. If students grade each other unfairly they can skew the grades.

Over Generous Case
Some students may grade all of the other students very high. This will cause their score to be lower compared to the others. This can be fixed by having students grade themselves and thus their generosity will extend to themselves and raise their grade the same amount. However, this doesn’t compensate for students that grade themselves too hard.

Creative Accounting Case
Some students will give everybody low marks and themselves very high marks in order to bias the data. This can be countered by checking student’s grades to make sure they are consistent with where the rest of the group graded them.

One being Penalized Case
If all of the students go against one student because they felt he did little work then he will receive a very low grade. This can be allowed to pass if that student really did do very little work but this case should be monitored closely.

Classroom Participation


It is hard to grade students on participation in a classroom setting because of its subjective nature. One method of grading participation is using Self- and Peer-Assessment. Professors Ryan, Marshall, Porter, and Jia conducted an experiment to see if using students to grade participation was effective. They found that there was a difference between a teacher’s evaluation of participation and a student’s. However, there was no academic significance. This means that student’s final grades weren’t affected by the difference in a teacher’s evaluation and that of a student’s. Therefore they concluded that Self- and Peer-Assessment is an effective way to grade classroom participation.

Legality
The legality of Self- and Peer-Assessment was questioned in the Supreme Court Case Owasso Independent School District v. Falvo. Kristja Falvo sued the school district where her son went to school because they used Peer-Assessment and he was teased about a low score. The teacher’s right to use Self- and Peer-Assessment was upheld by the court.