The Importance Of Self-Peer Assessment In Education

Besides observation, questionings and feedback, when asked to talk about other assessment tools that teachers use in their classroom, most of the teachers expressed their confusion. Almost all the teachers said that they used quizzes and short tests to check their students. Teacher D, for example, said:

I usually assign whole class multiple choice quizzes and have my students raise their hands to indicate their answers. From that, I can immediately see how well my students understand the lesson. It is time-saving and suitable for my teaching context.

It is evident that most of the teachers had a misconception about formative assessment, and traditional assessment or summative assessment is still dominant in their classroom due to many reasons

Even when they involve students in peer assessment they did not take it seriously as an important assessment activity. As noted in chapter 2, the active involvement of students in taking responsibility for their learning is central to the theory of formative assessment. (Black & William, 2004). Therefore, we can conclude that despite the importance of self-peer assessment in learning, teachers rarely implemented it in teaching. Even they used it; it was not as effective as expected. Moreover, for some teachers, they thought that some of the formative assessment tools had potentially negative motivational effects on their students, and take peer-assessment as an

In other words, they often used the type of assessment that mainly focuses on the ability of the students to arrive or produce or demonstrate their own learning. They rarely used the assessment tools that focus on the product their students were able to come up with. There are many reasons why teachers are reluctant to use formative assessment in their classroom. Time shortage and large class size are one of the main reasons that teachers mentioned in their interview.

Moreover, teachers decided their assessment types basing on its convenience for management. They prefer using tests or quizzes-traditional assessment to other kinds of assessment. It seems to the researcher that some of the tools used are beneficial for the teachers rather than the students.

Teachers’ attitudes towards formative assessment seem to be a significant obstacle to implementation of formative assessment. Although all teachers held positive views of formative assessment, they did not use formative assessments on a regular basis or in an effective way. This result is consistent with the previous study by Buyukkarci