The Impact Of Peer Assessment On Fostering Critical Thinking

Designed to explore whether peer assessment facilitates fostering criticalthinking abilities, the current study employed the Ennis-Weir Critical ThinkingEssay Test as the measurement for critical thinking, based on R. H. Ennis’(1987)definition of critical thinking as “reasonable and reflective thinking that is focusedupon deciding what to be believed or do (P.11)”. It accesses critical thinking in thecontext of argumentation, and the areas of critical thinking competency includegetting the point, seeing the reasons and assumptions, stating one’s point, offeringgood reasons, seeing other possibilities, and responding appropriately to or avoidingequivocation, irrelevance, circularity, reversal of an if-then (or other conditional)relationship, straw person fallacy, overgeneralization, excessive skepticism,credibility problems and the use of emotional language to persuade.Peer assessment served as the treatment in the context of argumentationwriting. Three argumentative writing tasks were set for the peer assessmentprocess. The peer assessment process was conducted with a guidance developedbased on the Criteria and Scoring Rubric for Ennis-Weir Critical thinking Essay Testand Stapleton’s (2001) Rubrics for Elements of Critical Thinking in argumentation.A pre-/post-test control/experimental group design was used, and the t-test wasadopted to analyze the data. Follow-up questionnaire was conducted among theexperimental group to reveal supplemental qualitative data on the impact of peerassessment on fostering critical thinking from the students’ self-acknowledgment.The statistic findings with significant t-values suggest that peer assessmentintervention elicits significant differences, that is, guided peer assessment facilitatesfostering critical thinking. Detailed mean analysis on the scores of each subskillreveals that participants show varying degree of improvement in the subsets ofcritical thinking skills tested by the Ennis-Weir Critical Thinking Essay Test. Themost striking change lies in recognition of circularity, that is, the students’ perception that each argument should contain enough justification rather than asubjective claim. Another distinct improvement lies in recognition of post hocfallacy, which means participants have shown an improvement in recognizing theerror of defining a specific incident to be a regular pattern. Besides, recognition ofirrelevance and straw person fallacy display a greater degree of perfection comparedto the rest of the subsets, though all of which demonstrated an enhancement.Follow-up questionnaire data reveal participants’ positive attitudes to the peerassessment, and confirm self-acknowledged improvement in critical thinking, aswell as in participants’ approaches to their study and life, including questioning,evaluating information and reasoning, etc.