Portfolio Assessment, Peer Assessment and Writing Skill Improvement

Abstract

Abstract-Little research has been conducted in the field of alternative assessment including portfolio and peer assessment in Iran. Moreover, In spite of the assumed advantages of portfolio and peer assessment, the practicality of these techniques needs to be investigated. To this aim, a total of 207 writing papers from 69 participants were collected to investigate the effects of peer and portfolio assessment on the writing components in two experimental groups. The data were collected from students of a general English semester course held at Sharif University of Technology. There were two experimental groups of 37 and 32 students experiencing portfolio and peer assessment respectively. As the treatment, students were supposed to write compositions, and for each composition, they were supposed to invest at least twenty minutes on a topic of interest e.g. sport, science, social issues, etc. And they were then rated by their teacher in group A and their peers in group B based on ten pre-established assessment criteria in each session during the term. After administering the writing post-test, independent t-tests were run to find the differences between the two groups. As the result, it was indicated that portfolio and peer assessment had the same effect on four of the five components of writing namely as content, organization, language use and vocabulary. But only there was a significant difference between portfolio and peer assessment groups on the last component of the study: mechanics in writing. The findings of this study have implications for language teachers, material designers, and educational policy makers.

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“…Students, who participated in this study, also managed to upgrade the mechanics of their writing (Table 3) supporting previous research (Yaghoubi & Mobin, 2015). Therefore, they confirmed that the use of PA can cognitively impact how students organise their thoughts as they write.…”

Developing Writing Skill of Language Students by Applying Innovative Teaching Strategy Model Based on Social and Local Wisdom Contexts

“…The focus of the treatment is the capability of thinking to write an essay. Other aspects, such as fluency of writing, the way to organize ideas, vocabularies, language use, and mechanism of writing are also included (Yaghoubi and Mobin, 2015). The data above shows that in the EFL-students group, there is a rise in the mean score of 3.26.…”

“…Accordingly, Jocobs et. al (as cited in Yaghoubi and Mobin, 2015) present the component of composition profile as a basis to assess writing skills and competencies; it consists of (a) content of essay, (b) organization, (c) vocabulary, (d) language use, ( e ) mechanics.…”

The Impact of Portfolio Assessment on The Moroccan EFL Students’ Writing Engagement

“…These four dimensions were at the same time recognized as being highly instrumental in the enhancement of students' communicative competencies. Other studies by Ghoorchaei, Tavakoli and Ansari (2010), Romova and Andrew (2011), Chelli (2013), Al-Qadi and Smadi (2014), Yaghoubi and Mobin (2015), Ozer and Tanrıseven (2016), Farahian and Avarzamani (2018) all reflected better levels of students' writing engagement during and after the process of portfolio development. The elicited data, mainly the qualitative type in each of these studies, demonstrated that portfolio assessment served students' writing engagement through, (a) encouraging them to invest more time and energy in their writings; (b) drafting more than once; (c) self-and peer-checking their work; (d) exchanging feedback; (e) communicating their progress; and (f) overall enjoying and appreciating their writing assessment experiences.…”