Rachel did not support peer assessment, her main reservation being that it was not objective. She said that she had tried it once but was convinced that it did not work for her and her specific level of students. She had given learners some written work as an activity they were supposed to write, after which she asked them to swap the books and mark each other’s work. She explained how to mark the activity, which was to read the work, check for spelling mistakes, return it to the owner to correct. When she finally checked what they had done, there were many mistakes and spelling errors. This resulted in upsetting many learners in the class, leading to Rachel’s decision not to use peer assessment again for formal purposes. She also claimed that she had to redo the checking herself:
“There were many mistakes done by the students and I have to double check and redo everything. Extra work for me”. (FUI/TR/2015)
It is clear from this related experience that Rachel believed peer assessment to be subjective and a waste of her time. The findings further revealed that Rachel seemed to have a limited understanding of peer assessment, in that she associated the term ‘peer marking’ as a form of peer assessment, as illustrated in Snapshot 6.2 below.
SNAPSHOT 6.2
RACHEL’S UNDERSTANDING OF PEER ASSESSMENT ENGLISH LESSON TWO: INSECTS
After completing the ‘Guessing Game’, her next activity was spelling activity. She instructed the students to take out their exercise books and introduced the next activity. She explained to the students what they are expected to do.
T: We will do the dictation okay. You have to listen carefully and then write down the words which I am going to say aloud. Okay, everyone must close their textbooks! Only your exercise books should be on the table and please do not copy. Listen carefully and write the correct spelling.
Rachel asked the students to spell 10 words. All the 10 vocabularies are name of insects which the students have learned in the first activity (Guessing Game). List of words: Mosquito, spider, praying mantis, grasshopper, stick insect, millipede, cricket, cockroach, beetle and ant.
Once the students finished their spelling, Rachel instructed the students to exchange their exercise book with their peers.
T: Now, I want you to exchange your exercise book with your friend sitting next to you. Your friend will help you check your spelling and see if you managed to spell all the words correctly.
The students immediately followed the teacher’s instruction. Then, Rachel wrote all the 10 correct spelling on the whiteboard and instructed the students to mark their friends spelling. While the students were marking their friend’s spelling, she instructed the students to sum up the correct spelling.
T: Please tell how many did your friends get. If your friend gets 8 correct out of 10, write 8/10 (demonstrates how to write the sum on the whiteboard).
Alongside these negative views, Rachel seemed to contradict what she said as she further explained that ‘peer marking’ created an opportunity for her students to gain judgement practice by evaluating their friends’ work. She stated that her students are very competitive and enjoyed the activity. She explained that the main reason for this was rooted in the Malaysian learning culture. Rachel also added that this activity helps save time and lessens her workload in terms of marking students’ work.
“I do implement peer assessment in my class. I sometimes ask my students to exchange their books with their friends and mark their friends work. My students like doing this because they can compare with their friends. The students here are very competitive because they like to compare with their friends. Usually, I will always double check what the students have marked. This is to make sure that they marked correctly […] Anyway, this helps to save my time also. Less work”. (PTLI2/TR/L2/2015)
Rachel claimed to use this strategy with some activities. Peer marking would provide a supplementary indicator in the assessment process, and also teach her students how to assess. However, Rachel’s reasoning did not explicitly link peer assessment to student learning, and this revealed challenges in both the teacher’s perception and students’ practices of peer assessment in Rachel’s ESL classroom. Despite her understanding of peer assessment as being similar or even synonymous with peer marking, she appears to believe that peer assessment is essential and has significant pedagogical value. She stated, “it (peer assessment) provides self-confidence and makes students become
responsible towards their own learning” (FUI/TR/2015). However, she explained that
there are two potential challenges for incorporating peer assessment into the ESL classroom, namely age and affective disposition. She associated age with affective disposition in that some students would dislike the idea of peer assessment as the assessors are also their competitors. Rachel explained:
“I don’t think that would work because students at this age are very sensitive to each other and they wouldn’t accept such a technique. The reason might be that they don’t like it if their work is assessed by their friend, especially if they are competitors”. (FUI/TR/2015)
In line with this, Rachel pointed out that peer assessment is not feasible in her classroom in that, if students were given the opportunity to assess each other, “they
wouldn’t do the assessment task and wouldn’t take the assessment seriously, especially if they work in pairs” (FUI/TR/2015). Furthermore, she claimed that in the policy “there were no proper statement or guidelines on how teachers could incorporate peer assessment in the teaching and learning session” (FUI/TR/2015).