Comparability of Holistic/Analytic Intra-reliability in Student/Teacher Assessment of Writing
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Volume two, Issue one
February 2012
Comparability of Holistic/Analytic Intrareliability in Student/Teacher Assessment of Writing MASOOD SIYYARI Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature Islamic Azad University, Science and Research Branch, Tehran, Iran Bio Data: Masood Siyyari is PhD in TEFL from Allameh Tabataba’I University and a full time faculty member at Science and Research Branch of Islamic Azad University in Tehran, Iran. His main areas of interest are language testing/assessment and second language acquisition. Abstract Despite the many pedagogical benefits of self-/peer-assessment, they are not often practiced in the classroom, due to the fact that most teachers doubt learners’ ability to do self-/peer-assessment accurately. Although several factors have been identified to affect self-/peerassessment accuracy, the literature shows the rating accuracy of learners can improve if enough training is provided. Given the abovementioned supporting literature, it was hypothesized that learners, if provided with training and practice, may also have the potential to show behavior similar to that of expert-raters in terms of holistic and analytic intra-reliability. To test this hypothesis, having been trained to do self-/peer-assessment according to their group assignment, 136 English-major students conducted self-/peerassessment of writing performance both holistically and analytically across 11 sessions. After correlating the students and raters’ holistic and analytic scores and examining the variations among the correlations, it was found that students have indeed got the potential to show rating behaviors similar to those of expert raters and at times even show higher correlations. This paper closes with some implications these findings can have for theory and practice, and some new lines of research are recommended in the area investigated in this study. Keywords: analytic scoring, holistic scoring, peer-assessment, selfassessment, teacher assessment, writing skill
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Language Testing in Asia
Volume two, Issue one
February 2012
Introduction With the advent of educational assessment in opposition to psychometric testing, assessment in support of learning became one of the major goals to pursue in education (Gipps, 1994; Brown 1998; Lambert & Lines, 2000). Among several methods and techniques through which the goals of educational assessment could be accomplished, the alternative means of assessment are considered most effective. These alternative means include the use of checklists, videotapes, audiotapes, teacher observations, journals, logs, conferences, portfolio, self-assessment, and peerassessment (Brown, 1998; Brown & Hudson, 1998; 2002; McKay, 2006). Among the alternative means of assessment, self- and peer-assessment have attracted so much attention in recent years owing to growing emphasis on learner independence and autonomy (Sambell, McDowell, & Sambell, 2006). In addition, self- and peer-assessment have been viewed as having significant pedagogical values. According to Brown and H
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