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Chapter 13 |
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Theory into Practice |
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Ch. 13, p. 491
Peer Evaluations
An evaluation technique often used in cooperative learning, especially in creative writing and (less often) mathematics problem solving, is to have students rate each others’ work on a specific set of criteria, before the teacher rates them on the same criteria. The peer evaluation does not contribute to a student’s score or grade, but gives the student feedback that he or she can use to revise the composition or product. Figure 13.4 shows a peer response guide that might be used for a comparison-contrast writing assignment. The partner, and then the teacher, would put a check mark in each space to indicate that the student has done an adequate job in that category. The partner and the teacher would also mark the student’s paper to make suggestions for improvement. Peer evaluation provides a formative evaluation for the writer, but it also gives the evaluator an invaluable opportunity to take the teacher’s perspective and gain insight into what constitutes good writing.
Evaluating problem-solving items. Problem solving involves several important components that fit most disciplines. Those include understanding the problem to be solved, attacking the problem systematically, and arriving at a reasonable answer. Following is a detailed checklist of elements common to most problem solving that can guide your weighting of elements in your evaluation of a student’s problem-solving abilities. Problem-solving evaluation elements
If you wish to give partial credit for an answer that contains correct elements or want to inform students about the value of their responses, you must devise ways to do this consistently. The following points offer some guidance:
1. Write model responses before giving partial credit for such work as essay writing, mathematical problem solving, laboratory assignments, or any work that you evaluate according to the quality of its various stages.
2. Tell students in sufficient detail the meaning of the grades you give to communicate the value of the work.
The following examples illustrate outlines of exemplary student work from mathematics and social studies or literature.
From mathematics. Students are given the following problem:
In a single-elimination tennis tournament, 40 players are to play for the singles championship. Determine how many matches must be played.
Evaluation
The three components in the evaluation were assigned points according to the weight the teacher judged each to be worth in the context of the course of study and the purpose of the test. Teachers can give full credit for a correct answer even if all the work is not shown in the response, provided that they know that students can do the work in their heads. But it is important to guard against the halo effect. This occurs when a teacher knows which student wrote which response and alters the grading of the paper depending on her or his opinion of the student. The same response should receive the same score no matter who wrote it. Use of a detailed rubric, or scoring guide, in evaluation is a way to make scoring more objective and thus to avoid any halo effects. ,p>From social studies or literature. Students are asked to respond with a 100-word essay to the following item:
Compare and contrast the development of Inuit and Navajo tools on the basis of the climates in which these two peoples live.
Evaluation
These two examples should suggest ways to evaluate items in other subject areas as well. Giving partial credit for much of the work students do certainly results in a more complete evaluation of student progress than does scoring the work as merely right or wrong. The examples show how to organize objective assessments for evaluating work that does not lend itself to the simple forms of multiple-choice, true–false, completion, and matching items. Points do not have to be used to evaluate components of the responses. In many situations, some kind of evaluative descriptors might be more meaningful. Evaluative descriptors are statements describing strong and weak features of a response to an item, a question, or a project. In the mathematics example a teacher’s evaluative descriptor for item a might read, “You have drawn an excellent chart showing that you understand the meaning of the problem, and that is very good, but it seems you were careless when you entered several important numbers in your chart.”
Note that each of these examples are much like rubrics and can be generalized to broad ranges of topics. If teachers and students discuss these during instruction, students will have a device that helps them understand what they are working toward and both teachers and students have a common language that they can use during instruction and in their formative assessments.
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