Abstract
Writing an effective essay in English is a serious challenge for most of the students, despite its academic importance, in Pakistan. The methodology used to teach writing skills is ineffective and the assessment criteria is outdated. In this regard, peer assessment and peer feedback practices have proved to be fruitful in enhancing the writing skills of second language learners. Therefore, this study aimed to examine whether there is any improvement in the overall writing skills as well as the specific subskills of writing after implementing peer assessment and peer feedback practices. A quasi-experimental design, called Multiple Baseline Time Series design, was used to collect data from the students during five interventions of essay writing, peer assessment and peer feedback process. Two intact groups of undergraduate students were chosen, through cluster random sampling, as experimental and control groups, from Center for Undergraduate Studies at University of the Punjab. The data collected, was in the form of essays written by the students and the scores given by the peers during peer assessment. Those scores as well as content analysis of the essays helped the researchers to analyze the results of the study. The findings reveal that although there was a slight improvement in a few subskills of writing, yet in the Pakistani context, these assessment practices failed to present any substantial learning achievement overall, as compared to traditional teacher-based assessment practices. Therefore, the study concluded that in our context, these assessment practices may be productive, if they are implemented with teacher’s assessment, after thorough training of the teachers as well as students.