The Impact of Collaborative Assessment on Iranian EFL Learners’ Listening Self-Efficacy

It has been argued that in recent years, one of the ways for increasing self-efficacy in a classroom learning setting is the addition of collaborative assessment into the daily structure within a classroom. Therefore, the present study examined the effect of collaborative assessment in contrast to that of static assessment on Iranian EFL learners’ listening self-efficacy. To achieve this objective, the researcher conducted a mixed method research in which 50 intermediate EFL students out of the population of 68 studying in private language institutes were randomly selected to take part in the study and they divided into two groups of experimental and control groups with 25 participants in each group through random assignment. Listening self-efficacy questionnaire was distributed to both groups in pre and post stages of the study. The treatment of the study was conducted for subjects of experimental groups for ten sessions. Furthermore, semi structured interviews were conducted with 15 participants of the experimental group that were selected through convenience sampling and six sessions of the course were chosen for observation. An independent samples t-test was run to investigate if there is any statistically significant difference between collaborative assessment and static assessment in terms of their relationship with listening self-efficacy of the participants in both groups. The results indicated that there is a statistically significant difference between the groups’ listening self-efficacy. Furthermore, the results of content analysis, employing descriptive statistics of the interview and observation data showed that collaborative assessment had the potential to develop students’ listening self-efficacy. In addition, it was found that the students hold a positive attitude toward collaborative method of assessment. Further studies are suggested to examine the effect of collaborative assessment on other personality types.