Effects Of Peer Assessment On High School Students’ Critical Thinking Ability In English Argumentation Writing

With the deepening of curriculum reform,cultivating high school students’ critical thinking has been one of the crucial things in secondary education and English curriculum plays a vital role in developing students’ language proficiency and thinking ability.As a fundamental way of language output,writing is not only a means of communication,but also a complicated cognitive activity which can be conducive to learning of language and development of thoughts.However,in high school English writing teaching,there has long been a lack of training of students’ deep thinking.It has resulted in students’ writings being empty,illogical and uncreative,which reflects a distinct lack of critical thinking ability.Therefore,how to cultivate students’ critical thinking ability has been an essential and urgent task in English teaching.As an indispensable part of process approach in writing teaching,peer assessment is considered as an effective activity to cultivate students’ critical thinking ability,intrigue their interests in writing and enhance writing proficiency.But up to now,the researches on the effects of peer assessment on students’ critical thinking ability have been in the stage of exploration and subjects are mainly college students.Thus,aiming at developing high school students’ critical thinking ability in argumentation writing,this study explores the effects of peer assessment on high school students’ critical thinking ability and intends to answer the following questions:(1)What effects does peer assessment have on high school students’ English writing proficiency?(2)What aspects of high school students’ critical thinking disposition can be improved greatly by peer assessment?(3)What critical thinking sub-skills of high school students can be improved greatly by peer assessment?The participants of this study are students in two parallel classes of grade two from a high school in Linfen,Shanxi province and the experiment lasts for 11 weeks.There are 48 students in experimental class and 49 students in controlled class.Peer assessment is applied in the experimental class and the writing procedures are: writing ? first draft ? peer assessment ? second draft ? teacher feedback ? final draft.Traditional writing teaching method is applied in the controlled class and the procedures are: writing?first draft?teacher assessment ? final draft.Students’ writings in pre-test and post-test are analyzed from the aspects of overall writing proficiency and critical thinking ability by using the independent samples T test and paired samples T test.In addition,CTDI-CV are used as research tools to measure students’ critical thinking dispositions in experimental class and controlled class before and after the experiment.SPSS 22.0 is utilized in this study to analyze the collected data in experiment and the major findings of this study are presented as follows.⑴Peer assessment and teacher assessment both have positive effect on students’ overall writing proficiency.Students in EC and CC achieve obvious improvement in their overall writing proficiency after the experiment compared with students’ performance before the experiment.⑵Peer assessment can contribute to the development of critical thinking dispositions.Compared with students in controlled class,students in experimental class have significant improvement in general critical thinking disposition.In detail,the experimental group improves evidently in the disposition of open-mindedness.⑶Peer assessment is conducive to enhancement of critical thinking skills.In comparison with controlled class after the experiment,students in experimental class show remarkable enhancement.Specifically,they achieve obvious improvement in the subskills of analysis,explanation and self-regulation.This study demonstrates that peer assessment has positive effect on students’ critical thinking ability.Based on the research findings,the author provides some suggestions on how to cultivate students’ critical thinking ability in English writing teaching,hoping that enlightenment and references can be offered to English writing teaching in high school as well as future researchers.On account of limited teaching experience and experiment time,the author also summarizes some deficiencies in this study and puts forward some suggestions for related researches in future.