The Relationship between Peer Assessment and the Cognition Hypothesis

Mona Khabiri,Sahar Sabbaghan,Soroush Sabbaghan

doi:10.5539/elt.v4n1p214

Abstract

It is believed that peer assessment equips learners with a skill set withheld from them by teacher assessments that enhances language learning. However, the benefits of peer assessment are limited to how well learners can conduct peer assessment tasks. Therefore, improving the efficacy of peer assessment is essential. One way to increase the consistency of peer assessment is to increase learner attention during the assessment task. The Cognition Hypothesis states that L2 learners engaged in complex tasks pay attention to more complex linguistic structures; as a result, learning increases (Robinson, 2001a, 2001b, 2005). The purpose of this study was to investigate whether complex tasks, as outlined by the Cognition Hypothesis, improve the accuracy of peer assessment. Thirty female EFL learners conducted three speaking tasks. Each task had a different level of complexity, and participants were assessed by their peers using a rating scale. The results indicated that the absolute mean deviations for the items on the rating scale decreased as task complexity increased. In other words, the findings showed that as task complexity increased, there was more agreement among the assessors. This indicatedthat peer assessment wasmore accurate and consistent for more complex tasks.

Highlights

In any teaching environment, assessment is critical
Additional studies have suggested that peer assessment promotes reflective thinking through observation of other learners’ performances, which in turn allows learners to understand the requirements of a classroom task
The purpose of this study is to investigate whether increasing task complexity increases the accuracyand consistency of peer assessment of L2 oral production

Summary

Introduction

In the last two decades, there have been conceptual shifts in the practice of assessment. Numerous studies have supported the claim that peer assessment is beneficial for learning (see Ballantyne, Hughes, & Mylonas, 2002; Boud, 1990). Additional studies have suggested that peer assessment promotes reflective thinking through observation of other learners’ performances, which in turn allows learners to understand the requirements of a classroom task (see Falchikov, 1986; Topping, 1998). Kwan and Leung (1996) suggest that peer assessment encourages cooperative group work. There is little evidence that peer assessment elicits negative reactions in the learning process (see Cheng & Warren, 1997 for negative reaction)

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