Effects of Self and Peer assessments on enhancing the writing performance: a study on the revision phase during the writing process: Arabic as a foreign language: learners’ Perspective

Abstract

Alternative assessments such as self- assessment and peer- assessment have become essential learning devices that can help learners improve their writing. This study investigated the effect of self-assessment and peer-assessment when the teacher’s grading rubric is shared with the students as analytical self- and peer- assessment forms. The study implemented self- assessment and peer-assessment in the form of an analytical rubrics to examine the effects of self- assessment and peer assessment on the version phase during the writing process. Twenty advanced Arabic foreign language learners from a private school in the USA participated in the study. They wrote and then revised a short Arabic story as part of the course writing tasks. Qualitative data from ten interviews and 20 students' post-reflective journals were collected. Data was thematically synthesized and organized. The findings indicated positive effects on the revised version of the writing task: peer- assessment contributed to enhancing description & meaning, promoted creativity, and improved textual coherence, whereas self-assessment led to detecting grammatical errors. Furthermore, both self- assessment and peer assessment had common effects, including helping the writers meet the writing genre conventions and develop metacognitive awareness. However, the findings also demonstrated negative effects: writers showed bias toward self-evaluation, and peer assessors expressed reluctance to rate peers’ writing performance. The findings suggest that self- assessment and peer assessment are essential learning devices that can be sequentially utilized to help learners tackle multiple writing gaps in the revision phase during the writing process.