Peer Assessment as a Tool to Enhance Pre-Service Primary Bilingual Teachers' Training

Peer assessment (PA) has proven to promote motivation towards learning and reduce anxiety while fostering critical thinking. However, there is limited research on pre-service teachers' perceptions and concerns regarding its application in their lessons, and hardly any study addresses the opinions of pre-service primary bilingual teachers. This paper presents a mixed-methods research that investigated how pre-service primary bilingual teachers analyse PA after a teaching experience using video-teaching. After an initial exploratory stage based on the Grounded Theory, semantic and content analyses were carried out. The qualitative analysis of the data was performed with NVivo Plus version 12 for Windows, which also allowed the transformation of the results into quantitative data. Results showed that the participants had a very positive attitude towards PA, emphasizing that this type of assessment helps them improve their teaching performance. Other strengths of PA identified were that it is a useful technique for their future careers, and they can learn from mistakes. Although the participants also mentioned a series of concerns regarding PA, their reluctance to change their practice could be easily overcome, as they would be familiar with this technique prior to beginning their professional careers. Finally, considerations and recommendations to apply PA in pre-service primary bilingual teacher training by using video-teaching are discussed.