I have been thinking about the assessment policy in my dept and would like to increase the amount of peer / pupil assessment that is used. The closest that I have come is the assessment criteria that I used for some of the webquests that I wrote: the dictators webquest but due to the appaling state of our ICT facilities (now thankfully refurbished) I wasn't able to do this effectively. Does anyone have any examples that they would be willing to share?

One thing that I used to do was to set essays from previous examinations. I would then give them the mark-scheme supplied by the exam board and get them to mark another student’s paper. This gave them a good insight into what the chief examiner was looking for. It is also based on the idea that they best way to learn something is to teach it.

When I was doing my PGCE I decided to get the students to write reports on my teaching. It was a painful experience – they were much more honest than my tutors. However, I learnt a great deal from the experience (more so than reading my tutor reports). In the dialogue that took place following the writing of the reports, I also felt the students learnt a lot from the experience as well. After getting it off their chest, they also became more tolerant of the mistakes I was making in my teaching.

One of the best examples of peer group assessment was at Richard Jones-Nerzic’s school in Toulouse. It involved students assessing teaching materials produced by older students. Maybe, Richard will post details of how this worked.

Not my idea but taken from the Christine Counsell series of British textbooks: 'Think Through History'. The idea is to take a complex event like the Reformation and invite students to produce a clear explanation for younger students. Because we have a Primary section in the school the older student accounts are actually assessed by the younger pupils. We have annual presentation where we bring both sets of students together, here with Mr Simkin making the presentations in 2001!


http://www.intst.net/humanities/y8/term2/r...l_of_honour.htm

What I would add to this discussion is how far ICT has made peer assessment so much easier to set up (and not just peer assessment of written work). I routinely ask students to evaluate each other's work once it has been placed on the school server.

On a related point, a very high percentage of my website is student work. I try to give a good example for each assignment so that students know what they are aiming for something before they start. And much of the work is what the class have selected themselves (by secret ballot). This is particularly true of PowerPoints, websites and videos such as in this most recent example:http://www.intst.net/humanities/y8/term3/a.../2004/index.htm

This always leads to discussion about why one piece is better than another, which , I suppose is the whole point of peer evaluation.

I'm only a entering my second year of teaching, so take this for what it's worth, but one application for self-assessment that I found useful was self-assessing classroom participation. I started to do it in the midde of my school year and it worked much better than I expected. In 99% of the evaluations, students were absolutely honest about things like their level of engagement and their behavior, etc. In fact, there were times when I felt as if I had to adjust their assessments upwards. I had them use a basic rubric to do this and I think it worked well.

-Stu