Implementation of Online Peer Assessment, Response, and Reflection with Standards Based Rubrics
Brockport, State University College at
In one of the assessments, students are assigned a specific teaching strategy (Glibert, Sawyer & McNeil, 2015) to create an exemplar lesson plan with all materials and adaptations for students with special needs. The specific cooperative learning activity students engaged in was the Lesson Development of Instructional Methodologies Assessment that utilized peer teaching through discussion boards, peer assessment based on a standard based rubric through discussion boards and mastery learning. As part of this assessment, students were assigned one of 20 different teaching strategies for implementation in a health education content area of their choice.
The students were then asked to share these through the discussion board format. The discussion board utilizes both a standards based self justification (HETE, 2018; Vatterott, 2015) rubric for discussions as well as assessing a minimum of three lessons. The students utilized peer teaching by submitting their teaching strategy lesson plan assigned to the discussion board. This allowed ALL students to review 20 different teaching strategies with developed lesson plans. The students then peer assessed, grading with the lesson standards based rubric (artifact), a minimum of least three students on the discussion board. When providing feedback, students were instructed to comment with warm and cool feedback (warm/cool feedback artifact - Capture 2 & 3) based on the lesson standards based rubric. (Advanced Solutions International, 2018; Vatterott, 2015) The peer response process (Liu, Guo, Gao, Fram, Ling, Zhang, & Wang, 2018) provided students the opportunity to professionally give positive and constructive assessment feedback based on the lesson plan standards based rubric while learning best practice teaching strategies.
Once students were finished with the peer assessment, they completed the discussion board self-justification rubric (artifact). In this rubric, students needed to justify why the score they gave themselves was correct by documenting instances from the discussion board activities. This is again, based on standards for the profession. Finally, students reviewed their peer assessments so they could make revisions to their lesson plans. These lesson plans were then formally assessed in the Blackboard assignment by the professor. The grading was based on the lesson standards based rubric (artifact) . The students were allowed a final submission of the assignment to demonstrate mastery of the teaching strategy, alignment of objectives, standards with the needs of their student population addressed. This activity culminated in a compare and contrast of an exemplar lesson model with their own that was peer assessed. The final products showed the growth over time of the students ability to produce effective and/or exemplary lesson plans. This activity provided peer, professor and reflective feedback so that the students were given the ability to "master" the teaching strategy, lesson planning and professional communication skills that they learned throughout the activities for this assessment.
This method has been used in my Assessment and Evaluation course as well as the Foundations in Health Education and Principals and Philosophy of Health Education. In two of these courses, we have dual seated students who are in the Public Health and School Health Education majors. In each course, this has produced an increase of student understanding, planning, implementation and mastery of material. One student from the class stated "As an educator I was able to see how being a reflective teacher through assessment, discussion and reflection can positively affect student learning as well as a feeling that the teacher cares more about student learning and retention then simply inputting a grade (Capture Artifact 1)." I was told by another student that I "modeled" all of the effective practice teachers need to emulate in the classroom.