Abstract:

In the framework of the European Space for Higher Education assessment of student learning is a key and useful tool to enhance teaching. Such improvement implies that assessment must be continuous, formative and focused on the acquisition of a variety of generic competences, skills and long-life learning. The aim of this experience was to promote in the classroom an active participation of students in a continuous assessment process using co-assessment and self-assessment as a part of an integrative teaching strategy that consider the evaluation a essential tool to improve learning. With this approach we expected to encourage student self-learning and promoted the ability to analyze the achievement of objectives and self-judgment. Besides, this experience also reveals student opinion of self- and co-assessment as a teaching tool. With this aim, students completed an initial survey that showed that students have a good attitude to the use of self- and co-assessment as complementary evaluation tools. However, 20% of the students do not like to be assessed for their classmate because they consider that students are more subjective and less qualified than the instructor, which is also shared by the 37.5% of the students that agree with co-assessment. An interesting data is the fact that self-assessment means self-scoring for 43%, meanwhile for the rest of the students mean the possibility of perform on-line a no scoring-trial tests. To test co-assessment in practice we have chosen seminar (student-elaboration and oral exposition of a theme), an activity that is also adequate to promote student learning including knowledge, procedures and attitudes. Before starting the activity students received two observations reports to be used as a guide for co-assessment. Assessment process was continuous and both students and instructor completed these tools each day that an exposition took place. Students also completed a final survey about the assessment method and the learning process. 70% of students estimated that seminars are motivating and enhance learning. However, only 40% of them think that co-assessment motivates learning. All the students obtained lower score in seminars when co-assessment is used. Self-assessment was used for final evaluation of the course, being the results quite different. 60% of the students obtained the same score using self-assessment or instructor-assessment. Besides, with self-assessment none of the students failed and, by contrast, the students that obtained the highest marks using instructor-assessment are under-evaluated by themselves. Together these results suggest that although co-assessment and self-assessment are good tools to promote the ability of self-thinking and self-judgment, students do not score themselves as they do with their classmate. Therefore, the application of co-assessment and self-assessment must be used as a part of an integrative assessment strategy always together with instructor-assessment.

Keywords:

Co-assessment, self-assessment, learning, undergraduate education.