The Effect of Collaborative Assessment on Students’ Writing Convention in Paragraph-based Writing
Najmatul Wardah
Diponegoro University
najmalwardah@gmail.com
Abstract
Writing could be considered difficult to achieve for the students since they were expected to be able to write, but most of the students had a difficulty in composing a piece of paragraph with proper writing conventions. Thus, this research was intended to build the students’ awareness to the writing convention through collaborative assessments as the solution to overcome the repeated errors made by them. The number of samples was 15 participants of second semester students of English Literature Program students of Diponegoro University. The participants were given four meetings of treatment in two weeks and were asked to compose some paragraphs consisting of six sentences including a title, topic sentence, supporting sentences, and concluding sentence in sixty minutes from the topic given in pre-test and post-test. The paired sample t-test is used in SPSS to find out the effectiveness of collaborative assessment. The result indicated that there was a significant increase of awareness towards writing conventions which showed the effectiveness of collaborative assessment.
Keywords: collaborative assessment, writing convention, paragraph-based writing
Introduction
This paper presents the outcome of the application of collaborative assessment on the second semester students of English Literature Program of Diponegoro University. Moreover, this paper only focuses on the increase of students’ awareness towards writing convention in paragraph-based writing by looking at the increase of awareness of students make in writing conventions. The graph of the increase is presented to support the data of this paper.
Writing is critical to student in education. Furthermore, they need to write in different language from their mother tongue language. Writing can be considered difficult to achieve for students as the last skill of language. One reason why many students fail to be able to write is the limited knowledge of writing in classrooms (Burns & Ysseldyke, 2009:4). Students are expected to be able to write or compose a chunk of language, such as word, sentence, paragraph and finally an essay for the advanced level. But, most students have difficulty in composing a proper paragraph which includes proper writing convention such as grammar, capitalization, vocabulary, and punctuation. They tend to make errors and seem unable to improve their writing skill although they are given the guideline of writing. The students can constantly make the same error for several times because they do not know which part of their work should be fixed, and sometimes the lecturer does not give them the proper comment for each student’s work since it is time-consuming.
McNamara (2000) claims that common achievement tests are more easily able to be innovative and to reflect progressive aspects of the curriculum and are associated with some of the most interesting new developments in language assessment in the movement known as alternative assessment (as cited in Khonbi and Sadeghi 2013:1553). There are so many alternative assessments can be applied in classroom, which commonly known as authentic assessment. Barbera (2009) and Barrett (2007) state that authentic assessment involves student engagement in the evaluation process by using authentic evidences of learning processes and outcomes (as cited in Khonbi and Sadeghi 2013:1553). In the recent years, there are a lot of authentic assessment applied in classrooms, for instance self-assessment, peer-assessment, portfolios, and collaborative assessment. Collaborative assessment itself is the combination of self-, and peer-assessment which involve students in reviewing their progress and result of learning in classroom.
The paper aims to see the effect of the application of collaborative assessment on students’ writing convention. Thus, the research question can be formulated as follows, “how effective is the collaborative assessment in writing conventions of paragraph-based writing for the second semester students of English Literature Program of Diponegoro University?”
Literary Review
There are two relevant previous studies to support this paper. The first study is written by Fahim; Miri; and Najafi (2014:1) entitled “Contributory Role of Collaborative Assessment in Improving Critical Thinking and Writing”, and the second study is written by Peters (2015:viii-ix) entitled “Exploring the Effectiveness of Collaborative Assessment Preparation with Immediate Feedback in an Intensive Adult English as a Second Language Classroom”. These previous studies show the novelty of this paper since this paper focus on the effect of collaborative assessment in writing convention.
Authentic Assessment – Collaborative Assessment
Over the past decade it can be seen a rapid expansion of interest in alternatives to traditional forms of assessment in education (Aschbacher, 1991; Herman Aschbacher, and Winters, 1992 in O’Malley & Valdez, 1996:1). Alternative assessment or also known as authentic assessment consists of any method of finding out what a student knows or can do that is intended to show growth and inform instruction, and is an alternative to traditional forms of testing, namely, multiple-choice tests (Stiggins, 1991 in O’Malley & Valdez, 1996:1). Examples of authentic assessment include performance assessment, portfolios, student self-assessment, peer-assessment, and collaborative assessment (O’Malley & Valdez, 1996:4).
As a part of authentic assessment, collaborative assessment has not been a big attention for scholars in educational field since it can be seen that there are not many of literatures and studies discussing about collaborative assessment. Collaborative learning is described by Smith and MacGregor (1992:11) as an “umbrella term for a variety of educational approaches involving joint intellectual effort by students, or students and teachers together”. In the past two decades, the implementation of collaborative learning, in various forms has become more mainstream (as cited in Hancock & Willey, 2013:3). Collaboration is fundamental to an intersubjective, constructivist classroom (Bandura, 1877, 1986; Vygotsky, 1978) and to the empowerment of individuals, especially young adolescents (Asociation for Middle Level Education, 2010; Erikson, 1968; Riggs & Gholar, 2009; Vygotsky, 1978 as cited in Parkison, 2014:43). By emphasizing the role of students in determining the content, criteria of success, and instructional climate of the classroom, the collaborative assessment methodology changed the traditional political dynamic of the instructional process (Dean, Hubbell, Pitler, & Stone, 2012 in Parkison, 2014:43). The dialectic of student-centered vs. teacher-centered did not apply within this paradigm (Parkison, 2014:43).
Although, there are not many studies discussing the potential of collaborative assessment for fostering language development in general and writing proficiency in particular (Fahim et al, 2014:3). Working together in a classroom setting implies action, that learners are actively doing something, instead of being passive recipients of information. In their small groups, students have vast resources of their own that they can tap into for more efficient language learning (Dörnyei, 1997 in Peters, 2015:10). Many times students accomplish tasks that they may not have been able to solve on their own (Swain, 1999 in Peters, 2015:10). Students learn together so each person is subsequently able to perform better individually (Johnson et al., 1998 in Peters, 2015:10) as this process helps students think about the questions and answers during discussions (Pandey & Kapitanoff, 2011 in Peters, 2015:10). By giving students an authority as decision-makers in learning activity will be a significant challenge for them.
Writing Convention
According to Hazel Hall (1998) there are several rules and conventions in academic writing, they are;
1) The students must write in a sentence. Sentences have the following characteristics: they start with a capital letter; end with a full stop, exclamation mark or question mark; and contain a verb (doing word).
2) Subjects and verbs in sentences must agree with one another. If the subject of a sentence is singular, then the verb form must be singular as well. If this sentence described the activity of several students the subject would be plural, so the verb agreement would be also plural.
3) The students must use appropriate punctuation.
4) Students must use the right vocabulary. It is important that you use the right vocabulary in your work. The mistakes that crop up regularly in students' work are usually due to confusion between two words such as: • affect/effect, quote/quotation, practise/practice, license/licence (the first is the verb, the second is the noun);
5) Students must use the apostrophe correctly (and with care). The apostrophe has two functions: it indicates the possessive case and contractions.
Research Methods
In this paper, a quantitative research approach was applied due to the research is an experimental study. The research design which was used in this paper was one-group design with pre-test and post-test or known as pre-experimental research. The sample of this paper were 15 second semester students of English Literature Program of Diponegoro University. The treatment was conducted in four meetings within two weeks including pre-test and post-test. Pre-test and post-test data are used to compare the effectiveness of collaborative assessment on students’ writing convention in paragraph-based writing which then are computed in SPSS of paired sample t-test to find out the effectiveness of collaborative assessment for students’ writing convention in paragraph-based writing.
In this research, writing conventions guidelines which was used was from Guidelines for Teaching and Assessing Writing by Ana Munoz; Sandra Gaviria; Marcela Palacio, (2006:12) as the guidelines of writing conventions and the score will be converted using analytic scoring from Brown “Language Assessment” (2004:244-245) which was simplified. The scoring rubric which was used is adapted from Brown (2004:244-245) with several adjustments in order to meet the requirements that is intended to measure from the students’ writing achievement. The scoring rubric contains of several criteria, they are; grammar, logical development of ideas, organization, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, word choice/vocabulary, and the last is sentence. Each criteria has maximum score 4 (four) and the minimum score 1 (one). Thus, the highest score is 32 which will be divided by 8 (eight) and multiplied 25 in order to achieve maximum score 100.
For collaborative assessment which was applied in this research, it had several checklists as self-editing and peer-editing of paragraph which were adapted from Oshima, Alice and Ann Hogue, Writing Academic English Fourth Edition. Pearson Longman (2004:317-318).
Convention Type of error Examples of error
Spelling Mechanics Fransisco is a bussines man.
≡ Case – capital letter I’m going to argentina next month.
?
Punctuation The students completed their work. they went to the cafeteria.
¶ New paragraph Ideas need to be separated into a new paragraph.
╱ Word choice Vocabulary He’s trying to make friendship with the new students.
~ Word order (words, phrases, sentences) Grammar The old big house.
∧ Insert word She is very special person.
( ) Omit word Britain exchanges products with the different countries.
V Verb tense Students will learning English.
I went to school yesterday. I eat lunch.
=? Agreement The people in my class who is studying English do a lot of extra reading.
8 Fragment sentence Even though he had the better arguments and was by far the more powerful speaker…
? Coherence Coherence & cohesion Illogical or non-sequential development of the text
Omission or overuse of connectors and transitions
Table 1. The list of writing conventions adapted from Ana Munoz; Sandra Gaviria; Marcela Palacio, (2006:12)
The students were teamed up of three students to have self- and peer-assessment within the treatment. There were five groups and they were taught how to compose a paragraph with proper writing convention since their writing subject was also the same. Thus, the writer only reviewed and then taught the guidelines to write a paragraph within four meetings. Every week, the students were asked to assess their own draft of paragraph and assess their peers.
Findings and Discussion
The collected data was computed using IBM SPSS version 22.0 for Windows. The data then was calculated using paired sample T-test in order to know the effectiveness of collaborative assessment application in sample group by comparing the data of pre-test and post-test of the sample group.
Pair Paired Differences t df Sig. (2-tailed)
Mean Std. Deviation Std. Error Mean 95% Confidence Interval of the Difference
Lower Upper
Pre_test_-Post_test 15.053 7.443 1.922 19.175 10.931 7.833 14 0.000
Table 2. The result of paired sample T-test
As the table shown above, it can be seen that the significance value (2-tailed) of the paired sample t-test is 0.000. The null hypothesis will be rejected if the significance value from the output is smaller than 0.05. Since 0.000 is smaller than 0.05, thus, H01 is rejected and Ha1 is accepted; that is, collaborative assessment is effective in teaching paragraph-based writing for second semester students of English Literature Program of Diponegoro University.
Figure 1. The graph of writing convention frequency in Pre-test
As it can be seen in the figure above, the highest achievement which the participants can get is the use of vocabulary which is followed by the number of sentences. Meanwhile, the grammar aspect is the lowest. This graph shows the ability of participants in writing which is really poor in grammar. In addition, this fact is supported by the works of participants who tended to compose a paragraph based on their own native language structure which is opposite with the English language structure. They tended to compose a paragraph in their native language which then was translated to English. This tendency made the students rely too much on the translator engine without paying attention to the grammar role and the use of vocabulary. Furthermore, their sentences sometimes lack of subject or verb which made the sentences become incomplete. Moreover, the structure of their sentences; that is, the order of the words within the sentence sometimes got inverted since they tried to translate it from their native language.
Next, they tended to skip reading the instructions which made them missing the opportunity to get higher score from what they’ve got. Some of participants skipped reading the instructions which made them writing a paragraph which was different from what the instructions asked. This result to the lack of logical development of ideas.
In addition, in pre-test there were some participants who copied the paragraph which was posted from internet which lead to the perfect score of grammar, the use of vocabulary, and etc. Reduction of ten points from the initial score of participants who copied from internet was decided to be done. The participants were explained that plagiarism is the act of copying someone’s works without any copyright and it is not a good thing to do.
From the result of pre-test, it can be seen that the writing ability of the participants can be considered poor since most of the participants got low score in grammar and middle score for logical development of ideas.
After four meetings of treatment which applying collaborative assessment in paragraph-based writing, the post-test was conducted for participants. The results of the graph is presented below.
Figure 2. The graph of writing convention frequency of paragraph-based writing
From the figure above, it can be seen that there is an escalation in all aspects. Since the participants were allowed to open their dictionary and another source, the students tended to pay attention in capitalization, punctuation, and spelling at most. Next, the students also got the increase in grammar aspect and other aspects.
Based on the figure above, the most of the score of number of sentences and vocabulary which the participants got were very high. This illustrates that the participants expressing knowledge of the content since they conducted a memory search and call on prior knowledge and experience related to the prompt or the topic in instructions given in research instrument (O’Malley, 1996:136). The supporting sentences which the participants made tended to be the example which they got from their own experience or knowledge they got from their surroundings. It proves that the participants elicited the prompt or the topic in instructions given to their background knowledge.
Next, the score of logical development of ideas and organization which the participants got were considered middle for logical development of ideas and high for organization. They were able to express the prompt or the topic in instruction given into a paragraph in pre-test, yet they were not able to compose it by sequencing the ideas in ways that match the purposes of the writing. Meanwhile, in post-test the participants showed the increase of the score in logical development of ideas and organization. Furthermore, the participants showed the significant increase in mechanics of writing. It can be seen in figure above that most of the participants got high scores in punctuation, spelling, and capitalization. The participants showed the increase of score in mechanics of writing which was affected by the application of collaborative assessment.
It was found in self-assessment session that the participants tended to consider their own works were already good enough so that the students needed to be reminded many times to check their own works since they do not have time to go back and reread their earlier drafts (Polio, Fleck, & Leder, 1989 in Khatri, 2013:70) carefully and check their drafts based on the guidelines given before. It is also clearly stated that students might not have the ability to correct their grammatical errors themselves without teacher’s feedback. The participants needed to be directed from each scoring criteria one by one, starting from subject-verb; punctuation; vocabulary; capitalization; and grammar. Most of participants agreed that they automatically paid attention to the capitalization and punctuation after following the treatment. In addition, they like the application of collaborative assessment within the classroom activities.
On the other hand, there are some participants disliked the application of collaborative assessment since they felt more confused after following the treatment. They said that while trying to focus to the material, they also needed to understand the guideline of writing which gave them too much work.
The next finding which was found was the participants did not have much background knowledge in order to compose a paragraph, they are; decent vocabulary, proper use of tenses on their paragraph, and they tended to forget subject verb agreement in the middle of writing process so that they were not able to perform best in collaborative assessment without the guidance.
Next, in peer-assessment session, this process led students to see and judge their classmate’s work in small group, boost their critical thinking and helped them to develop editorial skills and knowledge (Moxley, 1989 in Khatri, 2013:70). But some of the participants tended to point out their peer’s mistakes without giving any proper explanation so that they were not able to revise it much better than before. As learners communicate with their language learning peers in small groups, they must talk to each other to achieve assigned task goals (Swain, 1999 in Peters, 2015:2), the lack of communication occurred in peer-assessment session made the participants unable to revise their work, although they found several symbols on their work they did not understand in what way they should revise it. This finding is supported by some written comments of participants which stated that their peer within small group did not help much in peer-assessment session since their peer did not point out the mistake and explain it briefly to them.
The easiest way to make them to revise their own work is through teacher-assessment where the participants’ works were checked and general comments were given with some explanations about the writing conventions that were used on their works. Although, regarding teacher’s comments, the participants were the ones who making decisions, either follow the teacher feedback very effectively or ignore completely (Ferris, 1979 in Khatri, 2013:70) because the result showed that some of the participants tended to make the same mistakes which were already pointed out.
The application of collaborative assessment in this research project had some difficulties within classroom activities. The first problem arose within this research project was during the given treatment conducted, there were some participants who did not come because of their own circumstances. Next, the treatment had long interval in each meetings; that is, one meeting per week. The participants needed to be reminded about the previous meeting material for each meeting in the treatment given. The participants admitted that they forgot what had been taught from the previous meeting since they also had other lectures in a week.
Overall, although there were some problems arose within this research project, the participants were able to compose a paragraph and conducted collaborative assessment within classroom activities successfully because they perform better in writing when they work cooperatively (Ismail & Maasum, 2009 in Khatri, 2013:71).
Conclusion and Suggestion
The application of collaborative assessment is effective on writing conventions in paragraph-based writing for second semester students of English Literature Program because by involving the participants in such evaluative process, it made a positive contribution to language learning (Chau. 2005 in Fahim et. al, 2014:2).
It can be concluded that the application of collaborative assessment is effective in paragraph-based writing especially in writing convention for second semester students of English Literature of Diponegoro University.
It is suggested that the application of collaborative assessment in self-assessment should be guided thoroughly so that the students would not be biased since it is their own work.
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