Investigating the Effect of Peer-Assessment on Students’ Writing Proficiency

Effective teaching is the collaborative effort of both teachers and students. Teachers are expected to engage their students in teaching and learning process so as to make them active in the classroom. Thus, using peer assessment gives opportunity to a teacher to engage students in learning so that they take responsibility for their own learning. Accordingly, the main aim of this study was to investigate the effect of peer-assessment on students’ writing proficiency. In order to achieve this objective, the research question related to whether the use of peer-assessment can bring a change on the students’ writing proficiency was set. The study was quasi-experiment in design. It focused on 1st year Banking and Finance students of Jimma University. Two groups were randomly selected from the four groups and were again randomly assigned as treatment group and control group. Each group contained 30 students. In order to collect data from the students, paragraph writing test was used at the end of the intervention. The data collected were quantitative, and they were analyzed using inferential statistics called independent sample T-test. The result of the analysis showed that the students in the treatment group improved their writing proficiency than the students in control group. This indicates that the use of peer-assessment as intervention showed a significant effect on the students’ writing proficiency (t (58) = 3.537, p = 0.001, "Sig. (2-tailed)"). Therefore, it is possible to recommend that the use of peer-assessment in addition to teacher assessment is better than using teacher assessment alone so as to improve writing skills