The impact of tasks' peer assessment on enhancing cooperative learning

Abstract

The aim of the current study is to investigate the impact of tasks’ peer assessment on enhancing students’ cooperative learning. It attempts to figure out how students perceive peer assessment of tasks as an alternative method to the traditional ways of assessment. Also, it seeks to find out what benefits can students achieve when cooperating together to assess each other. Therefore, we hypothesize that engaging students in tasks’ peer assessment would enhance their cooperative learning. In order to check the former hypothesis and answer the research questions, we have employed the quantitative descriptive method because the phenomenon can be observed, analyzed and described. Also, a questionnaire has been administered to 70 third year students at the department of English, University of 8 Mai 1945, Guelma. The latter seeks to understand how students perceive peer assessment of tasks as a new way of assessment and whether it affects their collaboration with their classmates. The findings of the questionnaire revealed that most of third year students received tasks’ peer assessment as a good and beneficial strategy for both students and teachers. In addition, the majority of them claimed that this strategy tends to improve their cooperative learning techniques. In respect to the findings, we conclude that tasks’ peer assessment has a major impact on enhancing cooperative learning. Furthermore, this research contributes in adding a considerable amount of knowledge to the existing body of literature. As a result, we highly recommend University’s teachers to adopt this strategy in classrooms and we urge them to develop students’ capacities to become cooperative learners.