The Quality Of Peer Assessment Of English Writing In A Junior Middle School:A Multiple-perspective Investigation

The purpose of this study was to investigate the quality,i.e.,variability,reliability,effectiveness,and helpfulness,of peer assessment,i.e.,peer scoring and peer feedback,of English writing in a junior middle school from both student and teacher perspectives.Specifically,twelve Grade 8 students selected from two different classes(the difference of English writing ability of the six students in Class 1 is larger than that of Class 2)as well as two experienced English teachers in a junior middle school in Zhenjiang City,Jiangsu Province were participated in the study.Each student of the two classes was asked to score six essays written by six students in each other’s class holistically on a15-point scale in strict accordance with the provided scoring rubric and give feedback on every essay in line with three aspects of language,content,and organization,after that,the students revised their essays according to peer feedback received.Likewise,the two English teachers scored and gave feedback on the essays.Generalizability(G-)theory was used as the quantitative theoretical framework to examine the scoring variability and reliability of the writing scores assigned by student raters and teacher raters.While interview was adopted as a qualitative research tool to explore what the views of students and teachers on the effectiveness and helpfulness of peer assessment are.The results suggested that: 1)there were large residual variance components in the G-studies for peer assessment and large rater variance components for teacher assessment;2)the level of scoring reliability of peer assessment differs from class to class,the reliability of the holistic scores by up to three Class 2 student raters could reach that of the holistic scores by one teacher raters in the context of this study;3)the student participants who were both as the assessment receivers and assessors generally perceived their peers’ feedback as effective and helpful for optimizing their English essays,further improving their English writing ability.Important implications for students and teachers were discussed in the end.