| In first language pedagogy, alternative assessments, such as self- and peer-assessments, have been the focus of a great deal of research. However, in ESL/EFL pedagogy, few researchers have empirically investigated how effectively students can function as raters, whether self- and peer-assessments can be used as one part of formal assessment, the degree to which student raters are internally consistent (intrarater consistency), and the issue of rater severity/leniency. Multifaceted Rasch measurement was used in the present study to investigate how self- and peer-assessments work in comparison with teacher assessments in a university writing class. The multifaceted Rasch approach is particularly useful because of its ability to illuminate interrater and intrarater consistencies, rater severity, assessment criterion difficulty, and rater bias.; The results indicated that many self-raters assessed their own writing lower than predicted by the Rasch model. This was particularly true for high achieving students. Peer-raters were the most lenient raters; however, they avoided using the lowest and highest rating categories, and they also rated high-achieving writers lower and low-achieving writers higher than self- or teacher-raters. This tendency was independent of their own writing abilities, rejecting the hypothesis that high-achieving writers rated severely and low-achieving writers rated leniently. On the other hand, peer-raters displayed the potential to act as good assessors, as most of them were internally consistent when assessing other students' essays. Each of the four teachers in the study was internally consistent; however, each displayed a unique bias pattern.; Self-, peer-, and teacher-raters assessed Grammar severely and Spelling leniently. The analysis also revealed that teacher-raters assessed Spelling, Essay Format, and Punctuation differently from the other criteria. Both peer- and teacher-raters frequently showed bias when assessing Spelling, Essay Format, and Punctuation. Questionnaire responses showed that the participants in this study felt that they benefited through engaging in the self- and peer-assessments.; It was concluded that self-assessment can be utilized as one useful technique for learning essay writing. It might also be possible to utilize peer-assessment as a part of formal assessment, because peer-assessors were shown to be internally consistent. By using multifaceted Rasch measurement, teachers can inform peer-raters of their bias patterns and help them develop better quality assessment criteria, two steps that would lead to better quality peer-assessment. |
