Article 2 Response: Issues in Assessment, Enterprise and Higher Education: the case for self‐peer and collaborative assessment

This article was written in 1993, but I found it to be very appropriate for current issues in assessment in a secondary level. The article discusses strategies at a higher level education, like a Jr. College, but fits in to today’s issues at the secondary level. Today we are encountering issues of education being linked with economics and politics. There are three main ideas of assessment that are, self, peer and collaborative assessment. I find that each of these approaches are extremely valuable today in a secondary setting because it allows each student individually and collectively for the entire class to be held accountable for their own work and for their own assessment that they will have. It is extremely important for the student to have a say in how they will be graded, and I feel that it is just good practice as an educator to do that. With the current issue of common core standards becoming more of a reality now, I think that it is crucial to keep these types of assessment strategies in mind. Each student is different in their learning styles as well as whole classes are different from one to the next. I know that with the new core standards we as educators are going to be required to teach the same material to all students and all students are going to have to demonstrate mastery through the same type of assessment. But, I think that it is still up to us as educators to decide how they demonstrate that mastery. It is important to also teach our students responsibility and by having them involved in the grading process will benefit them greatly.

For me and my classroom I want every lesson of every day to be an enriching experience for myself as well as my students. I think that by having discussions through peer grading will help me become a better teacher, because I will be able to see what everyone thinks about a certain question on the assessment that they completed. If 60% of my class all writes similar answers to a test question and their wrong, peer and collaborative approaches will help me in seeing how I went wrong or didn’t fully explain something in the way that I had intended to. I don’t think that it is fair to the students to have all the blame for not performing well on a specific test. I think that the teacher should have to be accountable just as equally, because after all it is always the teacher that is “teaching”. For myself I want to know where my students are at collectively as well as individually, so I will definitely hold discussion groups as I return tests to get the students feedback of why they answered what they did. And with this collaborative approach, I think that it would still be ethnically correct to even change certain grades if the students can justify their answers through discussion based on what I had taught them leading to their ideas and therefore their answers on the test.

Works Cited

Somervell, H. (1993). Issues in Assessment, Enterprise and Higher Education: the case for self‐peer and collaborative assessment. Taylor and Francis, 221-233.