Self Assessment
From IAE-Pedia
Contents |
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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 each, potential employers, 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.
[edit] Some Possible Solutions
When viewing an educational problem, it is always easy to assert that schools should do better. Ech individual teacher bears responsibility for this task within the subjects that they teach. Here are two additional approaches:
- 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.
- 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 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 one 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. Word processing enables the student to manipulate the text and can they can also use the spelling and grammar checker to proof an edit material. This in itself is a powerful tool. The teacher is unable to get to each student and the computer is a great tool to assist the student in the writing process. The teacher and the student eventually proof an edit so the student can then write the final product. If students are taught to write and self assess their writing at an early age then students are learning to be critical of their own skills. This can only be beneficial for the student.
[edit] Examples of Web-Based Self-Assessment Instruments
Note: This is a work in progress. Reader contributions are welcome.
[edit] 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.
