International Journal of Education and Pedagogy (IJEAP) eISSN: 2682-8464 | Vol. 5 No. 1 [March 2023]
Journal website: http://myjms.mohe.gov.my/index.php/ijeap
SUSTAINABLE ASSESSMENT: SHARED DECISION- MAKING DURING PEER ASSESSMENT AMONG FORM
FOUR SCIENCE STUDENTS
Amelinda Lee Yi Chin1 and Renuka V. Sathasivam2*
1 2 Faculty of Education, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, MALAYSIA
*Corresponding author: [email protected]
Article Information:
Article history:
Received date : 21 January 2023 Revised date : 21 February 2023 Accepted date : 26 February 2023 Published date : 6 March 2023
To cite this document:
Lee, A. Y. C, & Sathasivam, R. V.
(2023). SUSTAINABLE ASSESSMENT: SHARED
DECISION-MAKING DURING PEER ASSESSMENT AMONG FORM FOUR SCIENCE STUDENTS.
International Journal of Education and Pedagogy, 5(1), 95-104.
Abstract: Sustainable assessment builds students’
capacity so they can operate effectively lifelong. These capacities include making intelligent decisions and judgments and can be experienced through peer assessment activities. In peer assessment activities, students provide feedback based on judgements and decide which aspects of the feedback to discuss. In shared decision-making (SDM), students working in groups must share evidence based on various opinions and make good decisions about the feedback. SDM enhances learning because students share their ideas and provide rationale and opinions. However, these kinds of activities are rarely done in schools. Similarly, meta-studies had indicated that peer assessment was effective but had not explored why. Thus, this study investigated the SDM process among ten Form Four science students who worked in two groups to provide scores (feedback) for their peers’ work and to see if there were any learning benefits. The students were asked to assess the quality of their peers’ task using a rubric.
Based on the rubric’s descriptors, students compared and shared their ideas about the quality of their peers’
work. Then, as a group, they reached a consensus about the scores. The focus of this paper is the process where students discuss the quality of work and decide what scores to give. Data collection involved classroom observations, focus group interviews and document analysis. The group discussions via classroom observations were analysed using a three-talk model.
The three talks – team, opinion, and decision talk were how students shared the decision-making process and eventually provided a score for their peers’ work. The opinion talk section was where most of the learning took
1. Introduction
Sustainable assessment can be seen as activities where students judge their work and others to become competent learners and operate effectively lifelong (Boud & Soler, 2016). Peer assessment is one component of sustainable assessment because it is an interactive process where students comment on the work of others, and this enhances their ability to make intelligent decisions and judgements (Panadero & Alqassab, 2019). To make good decisions on how to give feedback about peers’ work, students must show competency in the subject matter, evaluate the quality of the work against standards and intuitively make the correct decision. There are many benefits in engaging students in these peer assessment activities where they must make decisions about the types and quality of feedback with their peers.
However, secondary school students are rarely allowed to participate in these activities and miss many learning opportunities that can benefit their future endeavours.
When students work in groups, the types of feedback and decision-making become a shared process. Shared decision-making enhances learning as students develop decision-making skills, communicating their thoughts and ideas and collaborating with peers to make better decisions (Hsiao et al., 2022). This, in return, gives students the ability to give better feedback to their peers. This study investigated how students conducted shared decision-making (SDM) during a peer assessment activity and what aspects of learning emerged from this process. The specific research questions were:
1. How do Form 4 science students conduct the shared decision-making (SDM) process during a peer assessment activity?
2. How does the SDM process affect learning among Form 4 science students?
2. Literature Review
Peer assessment is a multifaceted concept (Ibarra-Sáiz, 2020). Students may experience peer assessment as an individual or a group activity. Students may or may not be involved in developing rubric criteria, although clarifying the assessment criteria is necessary. In clarifying the assessment criteria, rubrics or other structured formats for giving feedback may or may not be provided. Training in peer assessment may be given to assessors and/or assesses to a greater or lesser extent. These various forms of peer assessment complicate the implementation of peer assessment and the research outcomes.
place. The findings revealed that students were (a) asking for justification; (b) providing reasons; (c) actively looking for additional information, and (d) overcoming cognitive conflict. The findings have implications for teachers, school leaders and teacher education programmes.
Keywords: Peer assessment, Science students, Shared decision-making, Three-talk model.
Topping (2017) has defined peer assessment as “an arrangement for learners to consider and specify the level, value, or quality of a product or performance of other equal-status learners, then learn further by giving elaborated feedback and discussing their judgements with peers to achieve a negotiated agreed outcome” (p. 2). Topping’s definition has two main aspects: first, students (as assessors) need to judge the quality of their peers’ work, usually against some standards, and establish a form of feedback. Second, when ready with the feedback, they give their peers (assesses) the feedback and justify their decisions to improve their learning. The first aspect – where students must ‘consider and specify’ includes students’ capacity for informed judgement and responsible decision-making. As students increase their capacity to evaluate evidence based on their knowledge and understanding of the success criteria, they must decide how and how far they must provide feedback to their peers. However, developing effective decision-making skills is still lacking, especially among secondary school students.
Typically, peer assessment utilises peers’ skills and encourages learning as a collaborative endeavour. Thus, if peer assessment is done as a group activity, the ‘consider and specify’ part of the definition becomes a shared process. Students must discuss their ideas about the work, evaluate its quality, and decide what scores or feedback best suits the work. Students can discuss the feedback or peers’ scores with their group members and how they may want to present their feedback through shared decision-making (SDM) (Carless & Boud, 2018).
The concept of SDM was initially prevalent in the medical field, where medical students learn to make clinical decisions by seeing many different patients and making decisions about them (Oerlemans et al., 2021). SDM in healthcare is considered a cognitive and emotional process.
As students engage in the process, it requires them to integrate multiple strands of knowledge in an analytical fashion. SDM is an approach where a group of people share the best available evidence supported by a few options when making decisions to achieve intended outcomes (Elwyn et al., 2017).
Borrowing this concept in science education during peer assessment allows students to use their reasoning, analytical and decision-making skills when developing feedback. SDM allows students to communicate their opinions, ideas, and suggestions effectively and enhance their decision-making skills (Windschitl et al., 2018). Decision-making skills view different opinions and judgements so that feedback is appropriate and valid. SDM is important in developing 21st-century skills and is useful for students’ careers in the future (Akib & Muhsin, 2019). SDM is also important as students decide in a group; they need to come to a consensus, discussion and resolve any conflicts that might arise. These skills make peer assessment a sustainable learning experience because all these skills are generic skills that can be used in various situations and at any time.
In learning to make decisions, students must practice justifying their decisions with the knowledge or standards and discussing this feedback with peers (Ajjawi and Higgs 2008).
SDM allows students to develop their decision-making process where they seek multiple opinions, compare and contrast, evaluate, gather information and decide the best outcome for the content of their feedback. SDM is a process that allows students to experience cognitive biases and the negative impact of their judgements and, thus, realise the best decision-making outcomes (Dauer et al., 2022).
The peer assessment process aligns with self-regulated learning theory. When teachers make the assessment process transparent, students often gain competency in the subject matter. Using a rubric or checklist, students understand the assessment criteria and, thus, become competent in the process. Similarly, students are often asked to take charge of the process and given autonomy on how they want to provide feedback. Students often drive the peer assessment process. Lastly, relatedness exists since students collaborate and share ideas and judgements, provide a rationale, and overcome conflicts. This is why research on peer assessment has shown improvements in the effectiveness, motivation, and quality of learning (Adachi et al., 2018) and increased student responsibility and autonomy (Shen et al., 2020). PA can also improve students’ self-assessment by expanding their understanding of quality and judgment of performance and encouraging self-reflection on strengths and weaknesses (To & Panadero, 2019).
The benefits of PA and SDM have shown positive outcomes, but these experiences are hardly done in many secondary classrooms. Giving students the responsibility to take charge of their learning is often a neglected activity in schools (Hoogeveen & van Gelderen, 2013). These researchers noted that several meta-studies had indicated that peer assessment was effective but had not explored why. Moreover, how the shared decision-making (SDM) process occurs among science secondary students in Malaysia has not been thoroughly investigated. Hence, this study aimed to fill this gap and offered insight into shared decision-making when giving scores for peer work in a Malaysian context.
3. Method
Under this section, the method of the study is discussed.
3.1 Sample
This study used a qualitative exploratory design (Creswell, 2007) as the researchers wanted to gain insights into the peer assessment process, focusing on SDM when providing scores for their peers’ work. The study also investigated how the SDM process helped with learning.
Their class teacher chose ten Form 4 science students who were considered active and participated in classroom activities. The students were randomly assigned into two groups.
3.2 The Task and Rubric
The students were asked to complete a project-based “Waste to wealth concept” task. In this task, students had to develop products (that are environmentally friendly) from polymer waste.
The task was aligned with the content standards of the Form Four chemistry curriculum. A rubric was prepared to help students understand the task’s success criteria. The rubric was adapted from Wiggins (1998) and Urbano (2019). The rubric had five sections (Design, Presentation, Knowledge, Process, and 21st-century skills) with ten criteria. For example, under the section for Knowledge, the two criteria were ‘knowledge of the chapter’ and ‘contextual relevance and transferability’.
The rubric had four performance ratings, and each was allocated a range of 5 marks. Students judge their peers’ work and which descriptor best fits the work. The range of marks makes students give reasons and justifications about the work and then, through shared decision- making (SDM), provide justification for assigning their marks. After this, students must decide to allocate a single score for the work done. In addition, after each section, there was space in
the rubric for students to give their rationale for their decided descriptor/score. This process was guided by some reflective questions like How do you know your friend has already achieved the success criteria or vice versa and What should your friend revise to improve his/her task? The rubric was content validated, and any expert recommendations were addressed.
3.3 Procedure
The research began with the training of the teacher who volunteered to join the study. The teacher was given a half-day training about the principles of peer assessment and the dos and don’ts during the implementation of the peer assessment. After that, a discussion about the rubric and how the teacher should explain the task and rubric to the students. After this training, schools were suddenly closed because of a wave of Covid-19 infections. Since then, all the following activities have been done through remote learning. When the teacher met the students online, he began the lesson with an explanation of the goals and expectations of the lesson. The rubric was introduced, and students were given space to ask questions and work on other examples to understand the rubric better.
The students were introduced to the PBL task “Waste to Wealth Concept” and asked to complete it with their respective groups. The ten students were randomly divided into two equal groups. They were given eight weeks to complete the task, but the teacher frequently met with the students to answer questions and monitor their progress. After eight weeks, each group presented their findings. Subsequently, each student received a copy of their peers’ work. They looked at the work and, based on the rubric given, decided which descriptor best met their peers’ work. After a week, they met with their group mates to discuss the final scores that they provided their peers.
3.4 Data Collection
The main data sources were classroom observations, focus group semi-structured interviews, and document analysis. Due to the pandemic, the classroom observations were done online via Google Meet. The observation protocol was adopted by Creswell (2007). The students were observed when they discussed what scores to give their peers on their “Waste to Wealth” task.
The duration of each group classroom observation was two hours. The focus group interview sessions lasted about 2 hours and were done a week after the SDM session. The students were asked about their experiences of SDM and how their peer assessment process affected their learning. The researchers also collected their rubrics with the scores and their comments.
3.5 Data Analysis
The conversations between students during peer assessment as they were assigning the grade for their peers’ work could be divided into three main sections, in line with the Three-talk Model by Elwyn et al. (2017). Originally, this model was used in healthcare, and the three talks were team, options, and decision talk. For this study, we modified the three talks to team, opinions, and decision talk. Firstly, in team talk, there is the exchange of pleasantries, describing situations or feelings, and leisure talks, which happens among people who need to decide. Secondly is opinion talk, which refers to providing more detailed information about the peers’ work to make judgements and providing reason or evidence that can lead to better feedback. Lastly, decision talk refers to students considering all their opinions and deciding the best grade or feedback to give their peers. At the second level of analysis, we looked for codes
associated with learning. Our findings showed that most learnings occurred at the opinion talk, and they can be divided into four themes: (a) asking for justification; (b) providing reasons; (c) actively looking for additional information, and (d) overcoming cognitive conflict.
4. Results and Discussion
The discourse leading to making decisions about their peers’ scores can be divided into three types of talk.
Team Talk
In team talk, students exchanged pleasantries and described situations or feelings they faced.
The students did the SDM remotely; thus, there were talks about how they felt about the peer assessment process and some bantering to enlighten the situation.
Matthew: We have to take over the role of a teacher. … new experience… PA might be some sort of formative assessment that is included in our learning…
Ron: Don’t comment me as too traditional person, please. I still feel good about the old-time assessment style of just writing examinations. This is too troublesome…
Lex: I feel it is some sort of new experience for us. We at least know how teacher grades and scores our projects all this while… I appreciate our teacher who do all this work…
Students also exchanged pleasantries, such as Matthew asking Tan if he had done making his coffee.
Opinion talk
During opinion talk, students gave their justification for their opinions and their reasons/rationale about the content or quality of the work. There were also sections where students showed evidence that they had actively looked at additional information, shared it with the group, and overcame cognitive conflict.
Firstly, students asked each other to justify why they had given the marks.
Matthew: Tan, I remember that day you told me you gave this group excellent, why did you give them excellent? How did you determine excellent?
Tan: In their PBL task, I found that they give very advance knowledge. They used something that is starch-based bioplastic … they used banana peels which we all know is a food waste and it consists of starch that can formed long chain polymers.
Secondly, students also elaborate on why they felt the work needs improvement. For example, Sharon explained why she felt banana peel might not be an effective way to change waste to wealth.
Sharon: That’s my thinking too. I saw in this project the waste banana peels serve as an organic material with abundant availability. … My question is also same as Matthew, how are they going to collect all this banana peels?
Thirdly, students also did additional reading and shared their findings with their peers to ensure they can give better scores.
Ron: As I read their project, I also search some information myself to make sure I understand what they are writing. I found out that banana peel waste contains carbon-rich organic compounds that can create odour and producing excessive emissions of greenhouse gases… That’s why I mentioned must include some side effect as well.
Fourthly, the talk also illuminated some conflicts of opinion among students. However, various opinions are put forward, and eventually, the students have various perspectives to base their decisions.
Brian: …I don’t think it is environment friendly. In our chemistry class, when we add sulphur dioxide with water, we will get a lot of fumes, this here they have added hot water. Don’t you think the concept a bit not correct?
Andrew: Maybe not lah bro. Sure they will ensure it is safe only then they would say it is environment friendly. Information revealed that its production releases fewer toxic substance than making petroleum plastic… corn plastic can be composited, incinerated or recycled…
Brian: Even now, you are telling it can be recycled. Now I ask you if human use them the same way as conventional plastics, eventually, these waste also will pile up..
Chew: This is what I wanted to ask also because I did not see any explanation about the rate of consuming… if we use it in the same rate as plastics, it also cause problem, right?
Decision Talk
In this section of the talk, students must come together to decide what scores they would like to give their peers.
Ron: …can conclude that they do achieve the success criteria listed in the rubric, such as they provide visual examples to make us understand their application.
I feel that I should re-evaluate their scores and I could agree with 16 out of 20.
All the others in this group wanted to score the project as 18/20. Matthew took the lead by stating that there was a discrepancy in the score that they wanted to give their peers.
Matthew: I think we should conclude all the marks here. How do you want it to be determine? Take the average or follow majority? Here are the two choices but bear in mind we should be fair to our classmates.
Tan stated that they should take an average as one of their group mates has given a lower score.
They agreed to take the average scores because they would still be the same either way. Thus, they decided to take the average.
Shawn: If we take average, we will get a 17.6 mark then round off also will get 18 out of 20.
When asked students how the SDM and peer assessment as a process helped them with their learning, students provided two factors that enhanced their learning. Firstly, the students felt that peer assessment, especially with the rubric, helped them move forward to the next learning steps. The success criteria in the rubric offered what and to what degree students had learned to achieve the learning outcomes. Students become aware of their learning goals, progress, and priorities for further learning.
Brian: I feel that the descriptions in the rubric provided by our teacher during the peer assessment helped us to know what should be included in our PBL task and it was provided to us before the assessment so that all of us know what the learning outcomes were…
During peer assessment activity, students seemed to compare peers’ work with their own, subconsciously leading to self-assessment. When the students compared or evaluated their peers’ work, they had the chance to compare the PBL reports with their own to identify strengths, weaknesses, and other critical aspects to improve their work.
Tan: I read and reflected the PBL task that I was assigned to review. Really well done! The report included all critical elements that I would suggest that my own report should include or add on. … like my presentation for this PBL appears a little chaotic.
The findings revealed elements of sustainable assessment aligned with Boud and Falchikov’s (2007, p. 186-190) framework for developing assessment skills for future learning. As assessment is about making accurate judgement and sound decision-making, especially when providing feedback to their peers, students can increase their competencies if they are active learners in the assessment process. If students are engaged in responsible decision-making processes, they must consider the views of others and gather accurate information. Making the right decision is useful, especially when students are taught to make “value-focused decision making, asking questions of facts to ensure their accuracy, and a willingness to construct new alternatives that can provide better solutions to problems” (Quist & Gregory, 2019).
In crafting their feedback, students need to identify the knowledge they lack and seek ways to enhance their understanding of the content. Through the SDM process, students practised judging, justifying, giving reasons and rationale about their peers’ work, evaluating it against the standards, and finding ways to explain the feedback to their peers. To do this, students must be committed. Thus, the simple change in providing students to engage in these activities has huge benefits as sustainable assessment and its potential shows the skills students learn for future learning and decision making.
The study implies that teachers do not need expensive resources and tools to encourage active learning in the classroom. They must provide opportunities for their students that do not only focus on the subject matter but also on generic skills useful for their future learning. However, this process is not easy for teachers or students. Studies have shown that students with high- stake examination cultures focus on achievement rather than the learning process. As such, school management personnel must educate themselves about sustainable assessment strategies and how they can play their part in encouraging these cultures in their schools. They could set up professional learning communities (PLCs). Teacher education programmes can
develop courses or engage with schools to ensure preservice teachers are exposed to various student-based activities in real classroom settings.
5. Conclusion
This study contributes to the literature by unearthing why peer assessment is a successful and sustainable learning strategy via shared decision-making (SDM) when providing feedback. As Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick (2006) suggested, students doing peer assessment ‘must already possess some of the same evaluative skills as their teacher’ (p. 204). Like teachers who, through repeated action of making judgements about students’ work and working with other teachers, slowly begin to understand the necessary competencies associated with assessing, now is the time to ensure this understanding is presented to students in such a nuanced and explicit way.
By engaging students in making judgements, interacting with criteria, making decisions and sharing those ideas, the understanding of quality and tacit knowledge that teachers already possess can be developed (Gielen et al., 2011).
6. Acknowledgement
This work was partially supported by Grant number PV029-2020 and Universiti Malaya.
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