THE PEER ASSESSMENT AS A METHOD OF LEARNING: AN EXPERIENCE IN THE GRADE OF NURSING

Major social changes have been taking place over the last years (decades) and therefore changes in higher education. Teachers must go for a student-centered learning, understanding the importance of strategies and evaluation criteria. The evaluation should not rely solely on the student qualification, but it must be first and foremost a teacher's own reflective practice, quality control for making decisions to facilitate the improvement of learning. Hence, in recent years the concept of learning-oriented assessment is used.

The self-evaluation, co-evaluation and peer assessment could facilitate the development of skills such as critical thinking, formulating questions and seeking information from others. The idea to propose to the students for evaluation of their own colleagues in the new curriculum has several functions, such as developing the skills mentioned above, and showing to them the objectivity of the evaluation criteria in the new curriculum.

The objective of this project is to present a proposal based learning evaluation. The experiment is carried out at the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Valencia with students enrolled in the course of Community Nursing and the results will be presented. The learning situation is proposed through working groups (cooperative learning). This experiment consists of a project elaboration about "promotion, health education" . After the evaluation of each project is made by their own peers (between-group evaluation). A checking list has been elaborated taking in account different operating points and students must give the scores between 0 to 5, justifying them. The evaluation between groups will be made anonymously.
It is expected to involve the students in the task of evaluating their performance, to increase collaboration among students enabling cross-check their work, to improve the performance of their tasks and communication between team members and teachers, as well as to improve performance and evaluation of teaching, helping students to acquire a body of knowledge, skills and attitudes considered essential in the knowledge society.