| dc.description.abstract | Peer assessment is a process through which students give feedbacks for their peers’ works. In recent years, it was found that peer assessment could improve students’ works and abilities. In particular, it was useful to improve English writing. On the other hand, peer assessment can also be applied to train students to design game-based learning systems, which have been recognized as an effective instructional strategy so there is a great demand for designers who can develop game-based learning systems.
In spite of such significance, it was found that the quality of feedback from peers might not be as helpful as that from teachers because students might lack sufficient knowledge and experience. In addition, students might have their distinctive characteristics. In other words, individual differences might be a factor that affect the process of the peer assessment. Among various individual differences, cognitive styles affect how people process and organize information. Thus, there is a need to consider cognitive styles in the peer assessment.
Hence, the research presented in this dissertation conducted two empirical studies. Study One is to identify assessment differences between the students and the teachers in the context of English writing from a cognitive style perspective. The results of Study One demonstrate that the students did not have sufficient competence to identify various vocabularies so they were not able to identify the improvement that authors made. Moreover, Holists usually paid more attention to the superficial structure of the work in the Task Achievement aspect while Serialists focused on the connection between the topic and the details presented in the content, and cannot determine the mistakes of vocabulary and grammar.
On the other hand, Study Two emphasizes on the incorporation of peer assessment into the training for the designers of game-based learning systems and to examine assessment differences between teachers and students from a cognitive style perspective. The results from Study Two suggest that the students could not completely understand the comments in the Gameplay aspect so the revision might not satisfy the teachers’ expectations. Furthermore, the students could stand on the same status to evaluate their peers’ revised game-based learning systems in the Gameplay aspect so their expectations were not as high as teachers’. Furthermore, Serialists, who usually used a local approach to learning, could not grasp all of the design features in the Gameplay aspect and had difficulties to evaluate the entire pictures and objects in Artistic/Graphic aspect.
The results from the aforementioned two studies provide a deep understanding of assessment differences between the students and the teachers during the process of peer assessment. Such understandings can help students, instructors, and researchers to implement peer assessment that can accommodate the preferences and needs of different cognitive style groups. | en_US |