How does utilizing peer review and self assessment in a high school English classroom environment affect student relationships, growth, and quality of the final written product?

Seminar Title

How does utilizing peer review and self assessment in a high school English classroom environment affect student relationships, growth, and quality of the final written product?

Peer review and self assessment in connection to writing skills

9th Grade

High School

Language Arts

Writing

Grading student work in a timely manner is a struggle for all teachers, especially ones who teach English, like me. The amount of essays to read, comment on, and assign a grade to is overwhelming and extremely difficult, time consuming work. In order to alleviate some of the pressure of grading essays quickly and thoroughly, I decided to implement peer review strategies and self assessments to give students the timely feedback they need and deserve; this way students could learn about their strengths and weaknesses in their writing right after turning the assignment in, with their essay fresh in their brains.

I discovered the area for my action research through asking myself the following question: What area of English do my students struggle the most with, and what can I do, as their teacher, to remedy it? This led me to recognize that student writing needs the most improvement, and the way to accomplish this was through peer review and self assessment. Throughout my research, I learned that peer review helps students in a variety of ways, including but not limited to: more feedback, quicker feedback, social emotional growth, collaborative learning environment, and practice analyzing writing. I also learned that self assessment is abundant with benefits as well, such as: being self aware about one’s own strengths and weaknesses, higher confidence in writing skills, and critical thinking. When reflecting on how peer review and self assessment affected my classroom environment, student relationships, and writing skills, I learned both practices that were effective and ineffective. I found that peer review was more effective and accurate than self assessment, and also that peer review when anonymous was much more effective than when identifiable. I have also learned that in order for self assessment to be worthwhile, I need to explicitly teach how to self assess in a better manner. Lastly, I learned that the strategies used during my research greatly improved students’ writing skills, as well as created a nurturing classroom environment where students had strong relationships with one another based on trust and honesty. Due to my action research, I will continue to implement peer review and self assessment in my classroom for all of my English classes. Students appreciated the lessons, responsibility to each other through peer review, and self awareness to reflect on and process their written work. In the future, I will do research on more and different strategies to implement peer review and self assessment in relation to writing.