Involving Students in Teacher Education Assessment? A Case Study of a Peer Evaluation Experience

This study, on the marking of partial exams as a learning strategy tightly linked to some professional competencies and to the development of better learning processes, took place in three Teacher Training Colleges. Partial exams done by the students were marked in-situ by peers (by using a template designed for that purpose) and, later on, the exams were marked by the teacher. Furthermore, students filled in a questionnaire in which they gave their opinions regarding that peer evaluation experience. The purposes of the study were: (a) to compare the marks given by the students with those given by the teachers; and (b) to gather the students' opinions on the experience. The results indicate that (a) the correlations of the marks between students and teachers ranged from 0.66 to 0.90, although the mean of marks given by the student group was lower than that of the teachers'; and (b) the students valued positively the experience of peer-evaluation as a learning activity.