Peer Assessment in Teacher Education - Online

This paper reports on a study conducted into the feasibility, difficulties and potential of including authentic peer assessment in an online teacher education course. As well as confirming a number of findings reported in the literature, several surprising results surfaced. These included a degree of confusion, a feeling of inadequacy, and a sense of liberation among some of the 44 students who participated. As part of the peer assessment process, course members went beyond their proposed criteria to reflect on the impact on themselves of the report being assessed. In recent years there have been a number of recommendatio ns to include peer assessment in the school curriculum (Croft, 1995; Ministry of Education, 1993, 1994; NCTM, 2000). These semi-official and professional proposals may be valuable but, in our experience, unless teachers have personal experience of them they are simply not aware of the issues involved in implementing peer assessment into their classrooms. To address this matter, a recent Australian document entitled National Standards and Guidelines for Initial Teacher Education (Adey, 1998) recommends that, “Graduates should have the confidence and ability to engage in collegial peer assessment and self assessment as part of every-day work” (p.17) and that to achieve this, “Student teachers should engage in collegial peer assessment and self-assessment” (P.25). Adey’s contention seems very reasonable but research to date appears to provide only limited guidance about how peer assessment can be implemented successfully at the tertiary level, let alone in an online mathematics education course. Searby and Ewers (1997) in the United Kingdom claimed that peer assessment has actually been used in higher education for at least 20 years. In their case they included it in a BA music course to provide students with an opportunity to assess a peer’s musical composition. They concluded that the peer assessment seemed to improve the students’ critical faculties and gave them greater ownership of the learning and assessment process. They were also clear (p. 374) that, “Each year the criteria of assessment need to be renegotiated because the act of devising criteria is very important to the development of the students’ understanding of the whole process.” Searby and Ewers concluded that skills developed in peer assessment can be used by students to critically analyse their own work, which in turn enables them to improve their own performance. Fry (1990) reported that in a peer evaluation experiment in a British polytechnic peer grading correlated positively with teacher grading. Zariski (1996) mentioned that Tyree and Boud obtained a similar result in 1979 in the area of law education; they found a strong correlation between marks given by peers and lecturers for the same work. However, they also reported a degree of hostility toward including peer assessment marks in the formal assessment. Zariski himself observed that peer assessment reports (again in the area of law education) provided considerable insights into the competence and responsibility shown by the peer assessors. As far as we are aware, only two studies have investigated the use of peer assessment in mathematics teacher education. Zevenbergen (2001) has reported on peer assessment of student constructed posters. She found that peer assessment was a reliable process but, better still, the quality of student learning was considerably enhanced. For example, the