The Effect of Assessment Type (Self Vs. Peer) on Iranian University EFL Students’ Course Achievement

AbstractFor education to be improved, there must be some indications of the efficiency in its developmental stages toward the ultimate objectives. In educational settings, the outcomes have traditionally been evaluated by authorities, i.e. by teachers themselves. Nowadays, parallel with the developments in teaching whereby students are seen as having more control over their own learning, the task of evaluation too is assigned to the students. In the present research, the effect of self- and peer-assessment was studied on Iranian university EFL students’ course achievement. The participants (19 and 21 students in self- and peer-assessment groups, respectively, and all from Urmia University) were pretested on their current Teaching Methods knowledge (based on Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching, Larsen-Freeman, 2006). After receiving relevant instruction and training, while the peer-assessment group was engaged in peer-assessment activities for four sessions, the self-assessment group was busy with self-assessment tasks. An achievement post-test (with phi dependability index of .90) was used to gauge performance differences at the end of the course. The application of ANCOVA indicated that the peer-assessment group outperformed the self- assessment group significantly, F(1,37) = 7.13, P = .01. Further findings and implications are discussed in the paper