An online peer assessment approach to supporting mind-mapping flipped learning activities for college English writing courses

Abstract

English is the important international language in the world. In Asia, many non-English-speaking countries regard English writing education as one of the primary goals of English education reform. Faced with this trend, teachers tried to train students to master the skills of English writing to cope with the global villages in the twenty first century. In the flipped classroom, although students could effectively receive out-of-class and in-class opportunities for exercises to improve learning; however, summarizing, organizing, even evaluating others’ writing remain difficult tasks for students. In order to develop students’ learner autonomy or high-level thinking skills to achieve the goal of English teaching, the use of mind-mapping learning strategy is known an effective knowledge construction tool for helping students’ organizational thinking and paraphrasing in English writing skills. Besides, many previous studies have considered the peer assessment an effective learning strategy in the writing classrooms to provide students with a teacher’s perspective view to think and evaluate writing. Therefore, this research developed an online peer assessment approach to supporting mind-mapping flipped classrooms. Moreover, an experiment has been conducted to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed approach on students’ English learning analytics such as time involvement and learning reflections. It is important that educators could continuously create the online peer assessment learning environment for learners and aim for the goals to help learners become more critical, independent, and autonomous in English language learning.