Premier’s English Scholarship
ICT-based peer and self-assessment
Stacey Quince
Campbelltown Performing Arts High School
Sponsored by
Aims of the study
The increasing use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) as a learning tool is
changing the face of pedagogy across the globe. ICT is transforming and redefining the way
students engage in learning as a process, both within the traditional confines of the classroom
and beyond. Emerging e-learning pedagogies must be embraced and adapted to suit the learning
needs of students, whose learning will enable them to become valuable and significant
contributors to local and global 21st century communities. The nature of e-learning pedagogies,
combined with the exponentially expanding suite of software applications and web-based tools
currently available, offer a timely opportunity to investigate ways to engage students more
meaningfully in fundamentally important peer and self-assessment practices. In travelling
through England, Wales, the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland, it was my
intention to investigate peer and self-assessment practices which had combined with e-learning
pedagogies to improve student learning outcomes in the English classroom and beyond.
E-learning pedagogies
Professor Richard Andrews is undertaking significant research in emerging e-learning pedagogies
which he discussed with me at the University of London. Together with Caroline
Haythornthwaite, he is investigating the impact that e-learning is having within and beyond the
school context. They argue that e-learning is a “re-conceptualisation of learning that makes use
of not only instructor-led pedagogy but all the flexibility that asynchronous, multi-party
contribution can bring” (Andrews and Haythornthwaite , 2007, p 19). Given the opportunity that
“multi-party contribution” presents, it seems logical to empower students to contribute to the
learning of their peers in a way that is more authentic and effective.
Andrews argues that “e-learning is generated/made possible when the available resources for
learning (existing knowledge, the communities in which we operate) are transformed by the
learner (resulting in personal, social and/or political change) with the added dimension of peer as
well as teacher discussion (in space, over a geographically much larger domain than in
conventional learning) and asynchronously as well as synchronously (that is, in time)”. (Andrews,
2010, p. 4). This definition obviously applies most fittingly to online communities and virtual
classrooms but has application in current contexts in a broad range of ways. He also writes,
“rather than a hierarchical conception of knowledge, e-learning and its technologies promote a
“flatter”, more democratic, more potentially dialogical relationship between the learner and
knowledge” (Andrews, 2010, p. 7).
Of particular interest is the concept of a more “democratic” approach to learning, which
includes the essential components of “peer as well as teacher discussion". In a broad sense, one
can argue that ‘good’ teachers have always fostered a democratic class culture and encouraged
open class discussion. This model of learning, however, valorises peer assessment as a legitimate
tool in providing feedback and highlights the importance of self-assessment inasmuch as the
learner is an active contributor to the body of knowledge and therefore has a responsibility to
ensure that their contribution is meaningful and accurate. Given that traditional models of
assessment encourage competition rather than collaboration, it is also important for educators to
investigate ways to harness the collaborative nature of e-learning and adopt it into assessment
practices.
Assessment for learning
“Assessment for learning is any assessment for which the first priority in its design and
practice is to serve the purpose of promoting pupils’ learning. It thus differs from
assessment designed primarily to serve the purposes of accountability, or of ranking, or
of certifying competence. An assessment activity can help learning if it provides
information that teachers and their students can use as feedback in assessing themselves
and each other and in modifying the teaching and learning activities in which they are
engaged. Such assessment becomes ‘formative assessment’ when the evidence is actually
used to adapt the teaching work to meet learning needs.” (Black, P. J., C. Harrison, C.
Lee, B. Marshall, and D. Wiliam, 2004, p. 10).
In my discussions with Dr Christine Harrison, Kings College, London, she indicated she had
seen great success with teachers who engaged students in the learning process through discussing
and negotiating learning intentions1 and success criteria2 with them. She emphasised that
students are only able to achieve an identified outcome or learning goal if they understand that
goal and are able to do what they need to do to reach it. Thus, she argues, self-assessment is
essential to learning. (ibid, p. 14).
In my interview with Paul Black, Emeritus Professor, University of London, he also discussed
the importance of “training" students to engage in peer and self-assessment practices. He argued
that students need to be taught the skills and habits of collaboration in peer assessment, “both
because these are of intrinsic value and because peer assessment can help develop the objectivity
required for effective self-assessment.” (ibid, p. 15). He highlighted the complementarity of peer
and self-assessment, citing a number of instances where students were able to accept
constructive criticism from their peers where they had not taken similar feedback seriously from
a teacher and reasons that this may be because peer feedback is usually provided in language that
the students themselves naturally use. Not only does the process of peer assessment assist
students to achieve learning outcomes when their work is assessed and valuable feedback
provided, but there is a further benefit in being the assessor. Black believes that peer assessment
is also valuable because “students learn by taking the roles of teachers and examiners of others’.
(ibid, p. 14). In every school I visited, classroom teachers who used peer assessment on a regular
basis were able to substantiate that students benefited in both of these ways – as ‘assessor’ and
‘assessed’.
ICT-based peer and self-assessment strategies
Given the importance of peer and self-assessment in improving learning outcomes, and the
opportunities provided through ICT, there is a range of ways in which these two crucial
approaches to student learning can be married. Outlined herein are a number of suggested
strategies which can be used in the English classroom and easily adapted for many other
subjects.
Learning intentions are statements which outline the expectations for the learning in an activity or a lesson or,
sometimes, a series of lessons. (Harrison, C. and Howard, S. p. 23)
2 Success criteria are what students determine they need to achieve based on the learning intention. (ibid)
1
Audio and video strategies
In addition to the importance of ongoing feedback from teachers, educators are aware of the
importance of ongoing assessment by peers and learners themselves. There are several ways that
audio and video can be used to provide detailed, ongoing feedback to students on their work.
One such example is video to ‘screen capture’ to provide verbal feedback on a piece of ICTbased student work. This involves the teacher or peer assessor using the computer’s microphone,
combined with standard computer tools such as the cursor and highlighter, to point to and
provide detailed commentary on a student work sample. This might be something as simple as
an essay, or as complex as a film, which the teacher or student can pause as required. There are
many applications that can facilitate this type of feedback. At Queens University Belfast,
lecturers are using a free Web 2.0 tool, Jing, for this purpose but Debut Video Capture can be used
in a similar way. The feedback can be packaged as a flash file or saved on the internet which is
also convenient when students are provided feedback in person, as the feedback can be recorded
for the student who can then take it away and watch it as many times as required.
Portable devices might also be used to capture audio or video feedback for peer and selfassessment purposes. Madeline Murray from the National Centre for Technology in Education
(NCTE), Dublin, Republic of Ireland, discussed this increased uptake of cheap portable devices
such as flip cameras and plug and play MP3 microphones in schools. In many schools, flip
cameras capture feedback from students on their own or peers’ work, particularly in primary
school or when students experience difficulty writing. Students are also using video cameras to
capture debates, speeches and drama performances which they can then watch to peer and selfassess.
Plug and play microphones allow students to provide feedback to their peers, or reflection
statements on their own work for their teacher in audio form. In some classrooms, this is a
precursor to a more formal written self-assessment. Alternatively, this technology can be used
for viva voce, with students refining and reworking their response, as required, to ensure they
submit the best possible product prior to it being summatively assessed. Professor Stephen
Heppell, Bournemouth University, discussed with me the merits of such an approach in his
EVIVA project some years ago. In this project, students had the opportunity to use their mobile
phones for their viva voce on a major research project, “any time, anywhere”. In this instance,
the university worked with a telecommunications company to harness the power of voice
recognition software to ensure validity < http://rubble.heppell.net/archive/eviva/default.html>.
These portable audio devices also offer great benefit in capturing discussions during group work,
both for the students to keep as a record and for the teacher to be able to access the
conversations of all students in any given class.
Electronic documents
A number of schools throughout the UK are using simple but effective software applications to
engage students in peer and self-assessment on an ongoing basis. At Saltash.Net, students are
engaged in cross-form peer assessment through shared Microsoft OneNote notebooks. Storing
notebooks that are shared by a whole class on the school’s intranet allows students to view the
work of, and provide feedback to, students in classes other than their own using the audio tool.
With the success criteria clearly visible on the relevant notebook page, it is easy for peers to
insert an audio file giving feedback on how effectively they believe a work sample has met the
given criteria; what evidence they can find to support their assessment; and what the student
needs to do to improve their work further. In ICT lessons, students were using the screen
clipping tool in OneNote to provide evidence of having achieved each criterion as part of the
self-assessment process. The Deputy Head, Dan Roberts, reported that teachers have worked
hard with students over a long period of time to build a culture where peer and self-assessment is
the usual and expected practice.
At Sturminster Newton School, students are doing something quite similar using Microsoft
Excel spreadsheets. I observed students developing advertising logos, with peer assessment
occurring within the same class. After the class co-wrote the success criteria together, the teacher
pasted these into a spreadsheet and emailed them to the class. Students then had to provide
feedback to a peer on the logo they had developed according to the agreed criteria. The next step
was for students to respond to the feedback they had been given, justifying the choices. The
spreadsheet was colour-coded so that students understood which components needed to be
filled in by themselves and which needed to be filled in by their peer assessors. Finally, students
incorporated the relevant feedback into their refined logo. In other schools students were using
track changes and comment boxes in Microsoft Word to provide commentary on their own work
as well as feedback as a peer assessor. The success of these simple but highly effective methods
was based on students’ deep understanding of the predetermined learning intentions or
outcomes and often co-constructed success criteria.
At a more technologically sophisticated level, students at St Ninian's High School in East
Renfrewshire, Glasgow are participating in the e-scape Scotland project using ‘fizzbooks’ in a largely
paperless classroom. In this project student work including photographs, audio files and written
documents, is automatically collated into a portfolio on which the teacher provides ongoing
written and verbal feedback . Students duplicate this process as peer assessors, editing and
annotating each others’ work to refine and improve it. Students are highly engaged in the
process, with teachers reporting a significant improvement in the quality of student work as a
result.
Web-based approaches
Websites and social networking sites such as blogs, wikis and nings are also being used in many
schools throughout the UK and the Republic of Ireland as tools for peer and self-assessment.
Marilyn Murphy from NCTE showed me numerous examples of such work by students in both
primary and secondary schools. This included students blogging to critically reflect on their own
work; students co-constructing text on wikis and providing feedback to each other on their
contributions; classes using Facebook to reflect on their collaborative learning; and schools
working across contexts in the cloud to peer assess each others’ work. In many instances, at least
in the early iterations, many of these student work samples were accompanied by explicit
assessment criteria so that at every point the work could be assessed and refined to ensure
maximum achievement.
Many schools in Scotland are engaged in similar activities. In Cannich Bridge Primary School, a
tiny two classroom primary school in the Scottish Highlands, students have developed culturally
rich stories on the mythical Scottish ‘silky’ and are sharing them with students in schools in
Russia and beyond. They then receive feedback from these students using it to inform their next
writing process. Considering the remote location of the school, where students borrow books
from the mobile library that visits the town once a week, this collaborative learning on a global
scale is very powerful.
In The Media School, Bournemouth University, Andrew Ireland and his team have developed
CASPAR (Computer Assisted Self / Peer Assessment Ratings) <http://www.caspar.co.uk/>, a
web-based peer and self-assessment tool that allows students to assess their own and other
students’ contribution to the task as a whole, with each group negotiating and developing their
own assessment criteria. The program allows students to input marks and comments on
themselves and others at multiple points throughout the task. Students can view their cumulative
mark as well as read the anonymous feedback from their peers. Students see real value in the
process as the aggregated mark from CASPAR contributes to their overall grade. Online survey
tools such as surveymonkey.com or zoomerang.com. could easily be adapted t be used in a
similar way.
e-portfolios
The use of e-portfolios was a widely discussed topic across the UK and the Republic of Ireland.
In England and Wales, portfolios of student work are replacing external examinations in some
instances, and being used to report on achievement of National Curriculum standards in others.
“To enhance consistency of judgements by subject teachers, schools are submitting sample
portfolios of pupil work in every National Curriculum subject for scrutiny and feedback, backed
up by school visits and verifier reports.” (Daugherty, 2009, p.64). Similarly, Scotland's new
Curriculum For Excellence requires that, by 2012/13, students transitioning from primary to
high school have an S3 Profile which records their progress and achievements in all subject
areas. In some schools, these will include “learner statements" in which students reflect on the
skills they have developed as well as how they have learned. Across the UK, an increasing number
of schools have students developing these portfolios electronically (mostly due to ease of storage
and sharing) with students reflecting on their own learning, both in terms of individual work
pieces and on their progress over time. Professor Harry Torrance, Manchester Metropolitan
University, suggests that electronic portfolios provide an outstanding opportunity to capture
student learning as “expandable balloons". That is, they are an example of ‘divergent’ assessment,
“oriented towards identifying what students can do in an open-ended and exploratory fashion.”
(Torrance, 2007, p. 291).
Facing the challenges
There are a number of challenges which need to be addressed if teachers are to engage students
in an ongoing basis in meaningful ICT-based peer and self-assessment. The first is to build their
capacity to use a wide range of technology tools as well as a repertoire of meaningful ICT-based
assessment practices. In those schools where students were using technology as a basis for
quality peer and self-assessment which was embedded into school culture, extensive resources
had been put into professional learning, including on school development days, through team
teaching, in “twilight sessions” and as action learning projects.
The second challenge relates to the design of assessment tasks and criteria. Whilst it is important
to provide explicit assessment criteria, Torrance’s research in the area of post-secondary
education and training has indicated that “transparency of objectives coupled with extensive use
of coaching and practice to help learners meet them is in danger of removing the challenge of
learning and reducing the quality and validity of outcomes achieved" (Torrance, 2007, p.292).
Torrance and a number of other people I interviewed suggested that the emphasis on success
criteria could become too strong, with teachers and students treating it as a “tick a box" exercise.
He stressed the need for teachers to develop in students an understanding that not all criteria can
be exemplified in their myriad forms and that, often, the most innovative and creative pieces of
work, by virtue of their originality, deviate from a shared understanding of the set criteria.
The third challenge revolves around access to computers and relevant software/web-based tools.
Those schools in which e-learning, including technology-based assessment practices, had the
greatest impact were those schools which were not only able to provide regular student access to
computers , but which also developed policies and strategies allowing students and teachers to
access and download the necessary software and tools. A number of teachers expressed their
frustration at not being able to access appropriate sites or having limited access to the necessary
hardware to implement these practices more widely and consistently.
Without a doubt, however, the greatest frustration and challenge expressed by both teachers and
academics was the pressure placed on schools to perform well in external examinations at the
expense of what they believed constitutes quality teaching and learning. “The lack of synergy
across the internal/external assessment interface is well known. The pressures exerted by current
external testing and assessment requirements are not fully consistent with good formative
practices, with the emphasis on good test results affecting the careers of teachers, and leading
pupils to value their work only in relation to a perceived link with their successes or failures in
tests.”(Black, P., C. Harrison, J. Hodgen, B. Marshall and N. Serret, 2010, p. 226).
Time and again, teachers stated that the pressure to ensure that students performed well in
external exams, combined with external inspections such as those conducted by OFSTED,
meant that teaching and assessment practices were often directed towards “preparing students
for the test” rather than engaging them in the innovative, creative, challenging, intellectual and
collaborative practices underpinned by e-learning. “Resolution of such issues is an essential step
towards replacing the damaging discordance between good teaching and learning practice and
the pressures of summative testing.” (ibid, p. 227).
E-learning which is supported by quality, ongoing and explicit peer and self-assessment practices
provides a powerful educational platform for students. Not only has it been proven to improve
learning outcomes for students in terms of curriculum achievement but it also prepares them as
21st century citizens who have the capacity to reflect deeply, collaborate effectively, think
critically, and work creatively. Such an approach requires certain conditions however, namely - a
broad and innovative curriculum, a systemic trust in teachers’ ability to assess student learning
needs and meet these needs, appropriate resources and a balanced approach to assessment. In
other words, a stark contrast to an inflexible curriculum and ‘high stakes’ external tests.
References
Andrews, R. and Haythornthwaite, C. (eds) (2007). The Handbok of E-learning Research. London:
Sage.
Andrews, R. (2010). “Does e-learning require a new theory of learning?”. Unpublished.
Black, P., Harrison, C., Hodgen, J., Marshall, B. and Serret, N. (2010). “Validity in teachers’
summative assessments”, Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, Vol. 17, No.
2, pp. 215–232.
Black, P. J., Harrison, C., Lee, C., Marshall, B., and Wiliam, D. 2004, “Working Inside the Black
Box: Assessment for Learning in the Classroom”, Phi Deltan Kappan, Sept. 2004, pp. 9-14.
Daugherty, R. (2009). “Trusting the Judgement of Teachers: Changing Assessment Policies in
Wales”, Education Review, Vol 22 No 1, pp. 61 – 68.
Harrison, C., and Howard, S. (2009). Inside the Primary Black Box: Assessment for Learning in Primary
and Early Years Classrooms. London: GL Assessment.
Torrance, H. (2007). “Assessment as learning? How the use of explicit learning objectives,
assessment criteria and feedback in post-secondary education and training can come to
dominate learning”, Assessment in Education, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 281–294.