Exploration of a group assessment model to foster student teachers’ critical thinking

Though peer assessment has been widely recognized as an effective teaching approach to develop learners’ critical thinking, pedagogical strategies and analysis of students’ peer assessment at the group level but not individual level are underexplored. Group assessment is emphasized in this study by focusing on assessing peer-group work. In the context of 40 student teachers participating in online group assessment activities, this study revealed critical thinking patterns and their correlation with group performances by content analysis and epistemic network analysis (ENA). The results showed that participants’ critical thinking in group assessment activities mainly stayed at the level of understand. The high-score groups’ critical thinking had more connections between understand and evaluate, while the low-score groups’ critical thinking had more connections between recognize and understand, and understand and analyse. In addition, the high- and low-score groups showed different characteristics of critical thinking at different stages and different tasks of group assessment activity. Diversified and developmental critical thinking patterns could be found in the high-score groups, while the low-score groups tended to maintain single and fixed critical thinking patterns. Finally, the discussion and suggestions of intervention for critical thinking development of high- and low-score groups are provided to help design and implement online collaborative learning activities and group assessment activities in the future.