ABSTRACT

Research in assessment and evaluation indicates that providing students with a variety of formats to “show what they know” and to receive formative feedback in multiple ways and from varied sources greatly enriches their learning experience (Waugh & Gronlund, 2013; Miller et al., 2013). Student evaluation is traditionally conducted by the teacher, however two types of feedback that have been shown to impact student learning are that of peer and self-assessment (Wormelli, 2006; Guskey, 2009; Airasian et al., 2012). Students in my Secondary Science and Math Education courses at St. Thomas University are given opportunities to participate in peer and self-assessment of their pre-internship teaching skills through a mini-lesson video analysis process.  Within 24 hours of the mini-lesson presentation, both the presenting students and a cohort of their colleagues are provided with a digital copy of the video and are expected to carefully review it for the purpose of generating specific, formative commentary.  Both the students receiving the reflective peer-feedback and the peer evaluators themselves report that the process has greatly impacted their teaching skills.  Although used in this case for pre-internship teacher training, the evaluation methods described could be adapted to a variety of undergraduate and graduate course formats.