Self Assessment
From IAE-Pedia
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Introduction
One of the most important goals in education is to help students to gain steadily increasing knowledge and skills in taking responsibility for their own learning and use of their learning.
Our current formal educational system does a relatively poor job in achieving this goal. One type of evidence for this is provided by the poor results that many students receive on placement tests in English and math when they enter college. They find that they must take remedial courses that are at such a low level that they do not carry credit toward college graduation. The students have previously taken secondary school courses that cover these materials.
We can make progress in this learning goal by:
- Teaching students how to self-assess.
- Providing students with good formative evaluation self assessment instruments.
- Placing increased emphasis on the formative evaluation potentials of all student assessment.
The Problem
As students progress through school, they get a variety of feedback on how well they are doing. Teachers grade homework, have students answer questions in class discussions, give tests, and so on. Students may participate in group discussions or group projects. Students may make presentations to the whole class and get to view other students making presentations. Teachers may make use of rubrics in assessment, and share these rubrics with their students. End of term report cards (grades in courses) provide some sort of overall measure of a student's progress. All of this formative and summative feedback and assessment helps a student learn to self assess.
There are two major components that are missing from this picture:
- Often students do not get authentic, detailed information that lets them compare their knowledge, skills, understanding, and rate of progress as compared to national norms and against standards being set by or expected by teachers in subsequent courses they will be taking, by potential employers, by colleges, and so on.
- Often the formal school environment does not adequately enable and empower a student to make good use of self-assessment and other assessment information. Good assessment includes good recommendations on what to do to improve.
Roles of Self Assessment in School Improvement
When viewing an educational problem, it is always easy to assert that schools should do better. Blame for poor student performance is assigned to school districts, individual schools, school administrators, teachers, and so on. Blame is placed on low standards in courses, in requirements to move up to the next grade level in school, and to graduate. Blame is also assigned to poverty and to parents. Blame is places on the individual students—if they would only work harder!
Clearly, there are many scapegoats in this education problem. Moreover, there are many different proposals to improve te situation. From the highest political levels (No child left behind.) to the individual student, parent, and teacher, each stakeholder group has ideas for improving education.
Here is a very broad suggestion. Consider each stakeholder group and what it is doing to improve education. Develop measurements of its success. Include in these measurements self-assessment instruments designed to provide high quality formative evaluation to students, teachers, school administrators, and others who are directly involved in the improvement processes.
Formative assessment provides information about how well one is doing. It provides this information in a timely manner, to permit mid-course corrections in longer term projects. It includes information about how to improve on what one is doing.
However, none of this makes any difference unless the stakeholders are interested in learning how to make effective use of formative assessment, regularly engage in formative assessment, and make effective use of the information gained through the formative assessment.
Self Formative Assessment for Students
Consider the idea of self formative assessment for students. This would require a significant change in the instructional practices of many teachers.
- Starting in the earliest grades, help students learn to assess their own work, assess (and learn from) the work of others, to provide constructive feedback to themselves and others, and to take responsible actions based on the assessment information they get from themselves and others. Kindergartners can begin to learn to do metacognition (thinking about their thinking) and reflection on the problem solving and task accomplishing activities they are carryIng out or have carried out.
- Provide students with private, confidential, self-administered, high quality, interactive self-assessment instruments. The Web is an excellent vehicle for this. Good quality self-assessment instruments also include good quality analysis of the results and information about how to make effective use of the informative. Thus, for example, it is easy to determine one's reading speed and comprehension level through use of assessment instruments available on the Web. Some of these sites provide information about how to increase one's speed and comprehension. An alternative approach is to discuss the results with a teacher and get other types of professional advice on how to deal with performances that are not as good as oneself and others would like.
Teachers have the responsibility to assist students in learning how to self assess. Students can learn how to do this as soon as they start writing; this includes pre-writing skills. In kindergarten students draw pictures in response to questions or prompts.
In first grade students can begin learning the writing process. Students learn to brainstorm for ideas. Next, students state intentions of writing, focus on the subject, develop the idea, organize the information, and then check for the style and mechanics. Of course this sounds very technical for first graders. However they can begin learning the process by just writing. Students can also be taught proof reader marks and how to use them. Finally, teachers need to be involved by modeling and conferencing with students.
Computers have a great effect on this process. Students as early as first grade can learn to use a word processing format, and proof and edit their work. Of course the teacher would need to model this activity.
- A excellent example of this type of instruction is having the class work together to create a story. The teacher sits at a computer keyboard and a projection system displays the results so the whole class can see it. The teacher and students interact, making small and larger corrections and changes, and eventually ending up with a story suited to the cognitive developmental level of the students.
- Copies of the story can then be printed out so that students can read the story to themselves and to each other, add pictures to illustrate the story, and take the story home to read to their siblings and parents.
In a group or whole class writing activity, word processing enables the students and teacher to manipulate the text. Children can see how a spelling checker identifies some words that may be misspelled. children can make use of a spelling checker. Indeed, for writers of all ages, a spelling checker a very good aid in improving one's spelling. Similarly, a grammar checker can be a useful aid.
When students are taught to write and self assess their writing at an early age, the students are learning to be critical of their own skills. This self assessment, self-critical analysis is a worth while lifelong skill.
Web-Based Self-Assessment Instruments
Imagine a future in which a learner can readily find free high quality—fair, reliable, valid—self-assessment instruments that cover any topic that the student decides to study. Imagine that such instruments are accompanied by free, high quality Highly Interactive Intelligent Computer-Assisted Learning materials.
We are a long way from achieving that future. However, there is growing understanding that this is a good way to improve education. A growing collection of Web-based Self-assessment instruments is available at http://iae-pedia.org/Self-assessment_Instruments. More generally, a well crafted Google search is apt to come up with useful information areas a person might be interested in.
References
Haynes, V. Dion and Jain, Aruna (10/7/07). Whatever happened to the class of 2005? The Washington Post. Retrieved 10/9/07: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/06/AR2007100601165.html?hpid=artslot. Vogell, Heather (5/3/09). Easy grades equate to failing grads. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Retrieved 5/7/09 from http://www.ajc.com/gwinnett/content/metro/stories/2009/05/03/remedial_classes_graduation.html
Quoting from the article:
- Some metro Atlanta public high schools that don’t grade rigorously produce more graduates lacking the basic English and math skills needed for college, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has found.
- Many graduates of those high schools are sent to freshmen remedial classes to learn what high school didn’t teach them. As many as a third or more college-bound graduates from some high schools need the extra instruction.
- Unprepared high-school graduates are a growing problem for the public university system, where remedial students are concentrated in two-year colleges.
- Statewide, the remedial rate has climbed to 1 in 4 first-year students after dropping in the 1990s, said Chancellor Erroll Davis Jr. of the University System of Georgia.
Author or Authors
The initial version of this document was created by David Moursund.
