A Peer-Assessment Criteria Development Approach to Improving Critical Thinking of Students

Abstract

Peer assessment strategy has been noted as an effectiveness learning strategy for students to construct their knowledge during the process of evaluating peers' work. Moreover, this effective learning strategy further benefits teaching reality of the schools. In order to engage students to have more in-deep thinking during peer assessment activity, a peer-assessment criteria development approach conducting with mobile device for students is developed. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, an experiment was conducted in an art course with 103 students in an elementary school in northern Taiwan. Those students were assigned into an experimental group and a control group, which the experimental group learned with the proposed approach, while the control group learned with a conventional peer assessment approach. The experimental results showed that the critical thinking ability of the students in the experimental group was significantly better than those in the control group, showing the effectiveness of the proposed approach.