Examining the effect of peer and self-assessment practices on writing skills

This study aims to reveal how peer- and self-assessment practices influence the writing skills of 9th grade students. The study adopted mixed-methods explanatory design. The participants were 102 students attending a public school in Ankara. The quantitative data were collected through a quasi-experimental method, and qualitative data were collected through a case study. There were three groups of participants in this study: the 1st experimental group in which peer-assessment was carried out with 34 participants; the 2nd experimental group in which self-assessment was conducted with 34 students, and 34 students in the control group. The interventions lasted 7 weeks. Writing performance tasks and rubrics were used to gather quantitative data while a Semi-Structured Interview Form was used to collect the qualitative data. For the analysis, paired samples t-test, ANOVA, and content analysis were used. The findings revealed that there was a significant difference between pre-test and post-test scores of experimental groups in which peer and self-assessments were conducted whereas there was not a significant difference between the scores of the control group. The findings of ANOVA, the post-test results of the experimental and control groups showed that there was a significant difference between all groups in favor of the 1st experimental group in which peer assessment was applied. The qualitative findings of the study corroborate the quantitative findings. Hence, we can conclude that peer and self-assessment practices were effective both in the development of students' writing skills and on their attitudes and interests towards writing

Examining The Rater Drift in The Assessment of Presentation Skills in Secondary School Context

The alternative assessment, including peer assessment, helps students develop metacognition among the subcategories of assessment types. Despite the advantage of alternative assessment, reliability and validity issues are the most significant problems in alternative assessment. This study investigated the rater drift, one of the rater effects, in peer assessment. The performance of 8 oral presentations based on group work in the Science and Technology course was scored by 7th-grade students (N=28) using the rubric researchers developed. The presentations lasted for four days, with two presentations each day. While examining the time-dependent drift in rater severity in peer assessment, the many-Facet Rasch Measurement model was used. Two indexes (interaction term and standardized differences) were calculated with many-facet Rasch measurement to determine the raters who made rater drift either individually or as a group. The analysis examined the variance of scores in the following days compared to the first day's scores. Accordingly, the two methods used to determine rater drift gave similar results, and some raters at the individual level tended to be more severe or lenient over time. However, no significant rater drift at the group level showed that drifts had no specific models