Self assessment - getting students to practice a critical skill

Happy people evaluate themselves; unhappy people evaluate others.

  William Glasser

Dean Shareski referenced "Who Owns the Data" in response to "An educational Fitbit?" In his post he writes:

... I’ve been asking “Who Owns the Assessment?” I’m not sure we can really give ownership of the learning to students without them having some say in the assessment. Too often students complete work and give it to the teacher as if to say, “I”m done, now it’s your problem”. If a student truly owns the learning, they’ll be reluctant to hand it over unless know they will have some say as to how it’s assessed. Then when it is assessed, they should be able to do something with that data. They should own it.

Dean's observation reminded me of a task I often required of graduate students in my library management classes. In addition to doing their projects, they were also to create an assessment by which those projects could be evaluated - a checklist or other tool of quality criteria. And I asked that the students themselves complete this evaluation, applying it to their own projects. (And I gave them the grades they gave themselves.)

 

For example, one of the assignments was to create a floor plan for a new school library. So not only did the student submit a floor plan, he/she need to submit something like:

The floor plan:

• Accommodates a sufficient number of students
• Has a traffic pattern that allows high and low activity areas
• Includes areas for large, small, and individual work
• Is easy to supervise by a single adult
• Includes computer productivity areas...

You get the point.

Other projects included a library manual, sample policy statements, short and long term plans, etc. And invariably, students found creating the assessment more difficult than completing the project.

The students hated the requirement.

My objective, of course, in giving this as a part of the assignment was to enforce the idea that we as professionals must continuously be self-evaluators, not dependent on our supervisors to tell us how well we've done. As an increasing number of workers become self-employed, entrepreneurial/interprendurial, or  just plain treated like trusted professionals, effective self-evaluation becomes a critical skill.

Why do we not ask our students to be more self-evaluative? Justifying why a solution works, why an answer is correct, or why an interpretation is sufficiently supported is just a foundational ability any independent worker has to have.

Especially writers.

Comments

[Kenn Gorman]

I have found that self-evaluation for students is difficult for three reasons:
(1) They have never done it before, or only done it once or twice
(2) No other teacher requires it, so when I ask they simply complete it as another one of "those" assignments
(3) Convincing them that there can be an "A" evaluation, a "B" evaluation, and a "C" evaluation (and so on)

I do agree that it is valuable, but maybe we as teachers have not been shown or taught how to correctly develop this type of assessment?

[Doug Johnson]

Hi Kenn,

All your concerns are valid ones. I only asked this of teachers in my grad classes, not kids. And even they felt challenged by the assignment. Was this activity to be in some way scaffolded, it might work better. And I agree that teachers themselves may not always be well-versed in designing performance-based assessments!

Doug​

[Prabh Gill]

Nice Share Awsome Good Work