EFFECT OF PEER ASSESSMENT BASED COOPERATIVE LEARNING ON MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENTS’ ENGLISH WRITING PERFORMANCE

Writing is regarded as one of the most difficult tasks for middle school students who are learning a second language (L2), particularly when it comes to English writing. The study assessed the effect of peer assessment based cooperative learning by implementing quantitative method on the English writing performance of middle school students. 30 students aging from 12 to 14 selected from middle school by convenience sampling method participated in this experiment. After pre and post-test score comparisons, the results analyzed by paired samples t-test showed that the new teaching strategy significantly improved students’ writing performance (t=-3.227, p<0.05). After the experiment, a survey on satisfaction towards new teaching strategy was conducted indicating that they found the new approach to be really satisfactory based on the questionnaire. Therefore, peer assessment based cooperative learning not only enhanced students’ satisfaction but also effectively improved English writing performance.