Constructing from Assessment: An Empirical Study of Peer Assessment Affecting Metacognitive Skills

Peer assessment is believed to significantly promote learners‘ multiple higher-order thinking skills, and learners’ feedback and reflections during peer assessment also have an impact on their cognitive construction process. In order to clarify the mechanisms and pathways through which peer assessment affects metacognitive level, this paper conducted a semester-long quasi-experimental study from a constructivist perspective, using text data of in-group discussion sessions and peer assessment rubrics of learners for text data mining, and found that the overall metacognitive level of the students was progressively deeper with the peer assessment through cognitive network analysis, and at the same time, the students in the high-performance group of the high performance group had a more continuous growth of cognitive level, while the development of cognitive level of students in the low performance group was more chaotic. In addition, we calculated the cognitive task load of students' peer assessment, and found that peer assessment did not increase the cognitive load of students. The results of the study show that peer assessment helps to improve students‘ metacognitive level, and provides a theoretical basis for teachers’ subject teaching design and new ideas and methods for educational practice, with a view to promoting the reform of educational assessment and the all-round development of students.