What Peer Marking Can Tell You About the Marker

Peer Marking:
-time saver
-gives children the opportunity to see each others' work
-allows pupils to receive feedback from people their own age

Here's something we've recently learned to use better...
- Pupil A completes their work
- Passes it to Pupil B
- Pupil B reads the work and leaves a peer assessment 
(This does all the points above)

- Teacher reads the assessment and gains a better understanding of Pupil B's grasp of the task

Some examples:

Above: peer used 'story' - we were writing a recount. 'Describing more' is ok, but describing what and how - does the peer assessor know?

Above: 'Nothing' - really? A piece of writing in Year Five (or at any age) with no scope for improvement?

Above: Tense identified. What 'sentence types' and why?

Look at your peer assessments more closely. What does it tell you about the pupil carrying out the assessment? What do and don't they know?

Bake Off for Evaluation Success

Last week, my mind was cast back a number of years. A few years back, we were researching, designing and then making our own biscuits. During the 'research' stage, a Year Five boy explained to me how he was evaluating the biscuits I'd provided "Like they do on Bake Off". Genius! So, the lesson stopped, the previous night's Bake Off went on and our evaluating and vocabulary improved. Instead of mostly eating their way through biscuits and saying "nice", "nicer", "not so nice" and so on, children were now commenting on the snap, appearance and much more than just the taste and their personal opinions. 

Image credit: Little Bakery

Last week, I thought about how the baking on Bake Off was evaluated. Such depth could be used to improve all evaluating and in particular peer assessments and reviews. Watch and example of how to evaluate baking before evaluating something.