way of finding out those areas where learners lack awareness, and working
out what to do to help learners to address such areas.
7 Use self-assessment to speed up your assessments. Particularly with the
assessment of learners’ written work, it can be much faster to mark work that
learners themselves have already self-assessed, than to mark ‘raw’ exercises
or tests. It becomes easier to identify those areas where learners really need
feedback from you and, for example, to plan further exercises to address
issues that are causing most learners some difficulty.
8 Allow self-assessment to deepen learning. It is highly productive to get
learners themselves to work out what was good and what was problematic in
their own work. This, at the very least, helps them to reflect on everything
that they have done in a test or an exercise. At best, learners self-assessing
often then see what they could have done to avoid mistakes. They then have
the sense of ownership of such discoveries, and can be much more likely to
build on this ownership than if someone else had assessed their work.
9 Help learners to develop a culture of self-assessment. Learners who have
become accustomed to the processes of self-assessment are able to extend
them into their revision strategies. Revision is better focused if learners are
continuously measuring their own performance, rather than trying to prepare
for the unknown.
10 Consider sometimes coupling learner self-assessment with peer-
assessment. Although self-assessment is essentially quite different from
peer-assessment, it is useful for learners to have some opportunities to
compare the ways they are self-assessing their work with fellow learners. A
way of bridging the gap is to use the occasional task or exercise that is first
self-assessed, then peer-assessed, and to get learners to look for the things that
they learnt from any differences that arose between the two approaches.41 Getting learner peer-assessment going
Peer-assessment can be particularly useful for language learning, because it is in
itself a demanding and multifaceted communication task. The following
suggestions may alert you to ways in which you might choose to build on the
benefits of peer-assessment.
1 Use peer-assessment as a way of getting more feedback to learners. This
can include feedback on both oral and written exercises. If the ability range
of the group is mixed, you may need to ensure that learners don’t always
receive feedback from the same peers, so that the feedback given by the most
able learners is shared around the whole group.
2 Explain the benefits of peer-assessment to learners. It is important that
they don’t feel that peer-assessment is a cop out on your part! Explain to
them that peer-assessment means that they get more feedback than youASSESSMENT 77