Introducing peer review and scoring

At this stage, it is useful to have pupils review each other’s work. Peer assessment enables children to give each other valuable feedback so they learn from and support each other. It adds a valuable dimension to learning: the opportunity to talk, discuss, explain and challenge each other enables children to achieve beyond what they can learn unaided. Peer assessment helps develop self-assessment, which promotes independent learning, helping children take more responsibility for their own progress. The agreed mark schemes provide children with clear success criteria to help them assess the quality of their work and the work of others. Talking about writing is a vital feature of the IPEELL strategy. Pupils can learn a lot from each other. Reading the work of competent writers can also provide less confident pupils with ideas for improving their own writing. Explaining how a partner might improve their writing can be challenging even for more able writers, and it makes them examine what they need to do to engage their readers. Of course, it doesn’t happen overnight and pupils will need a lot of prompts and practice to become skilful assessors of their own work or the work of others. For example: “Find one example you are really proud of and circle it. Tell your partner why you are pleased with it.”

“Decide with your talk partner which of the success criteria you have been most successful with and which one needs help or could be taken even further.” Pupils should: i) Identify what has been done well and ii) Explain why it has been done well Then: iii) Identify what could be improved and iv) Explain how it could be improved The mark scheme provides an objective measure against which each piece can be assessed, but some of the judgements remain subjective and pupils will need help making decisions. Marking a piece of work together with the class is a useful exercise in establishing how many marks should be awarded and why. E.g. “Did the writer use varied openers?” “No. Most paragraphs started with ‘Then’.” “So at most we can award one mark out of three.” As pupils become more skilled at self-evaluation, the mark scheme can become more detailed, encouraging specific aspects for development. For example: “If you use a rhetorical question appropriately, you could gain an extra mark.” In some schools, capable writers are asked to match particular pieces of writing with mark sheets so that they can demonstrate their ability to assess accurately. When they can prove competence, they can then work with other children to help them with marking. It is also a good idea to vary the marking partners so that pupils work with peers of similar and different abilities. Writers at all levels can learn from each other and it is important to establish a positive ethos where pupils want to support each other to improve the quality of their work.