Why students should self-assess

This year in my MetLife Fellowship at Teachers Network Leadership Institute, I'm researching how I can help my students do more self-assessment and become more reflective learners.  I've already discussed what reflection is, and to be honest I'm still struggling with coming up with a definition that pleases me.

I know a big part of it is self-assessment.  Students need to be able to look at their own work and say what is good about it and what needs improvement.  They should do this because this is what real readers and writers do.  Too often, my students complete work but don't think about what they did.  They aren't worried about quality, just completeness.  When writing an essay, they rarely look it over and think about what they did.  They don't see that as their job.  But, as "real" writers, we do that all the time.  We identify parts that we are very proud of and revise parts that we aren't too convinced are good. 

Self-assessment also helps teachers see the invisible process of reading and writing.  We can see the end product, but that doesn't always give us the total picture.  Talking with students about their work and how they went about completing it can give us valuable information about where there might be problems and where our work is successful. 

Doing this work is also activating higher order thinking skills as they will need to take a step back from their work and truly evaluate its effectiveness.  Not only is this sparking deeper critical thought, it also gives students ownership of their work.  When the teacher is the sole assesser, the work becomes a joint effort: the student completes the work, the teacher tells the student what to change, and the student changes it.  What I'm finding is that when I read a student's essay, I see something that I would like to see changed, but the student also has questions and things they aren't sure of.  Who's to say that I'm always "right"?

Students are very reluctant to do this self-assessment, though.  Too much in the past, they have done work and the teacher has been the sole assesser.  They don't see it as their job to think critically about their own work.  Yet, it is.  We won't always be there to assess them.  Yes, it is important for us to assess student work - I'm not saying that we shouldn't.  But, we ALSO need to teach students to assess their own work and own it.  This is a skill that needs to be taught and sometime we need to put our assessments on the back burner and let the students follow their own assessments.

Comments

[Ewan McIntosh]

Self-assessment is central to learning for many reasons other than those (good ones) you mention. In Scotland it is a national policy that all schools have an active application of Assessment for Learning. More on what it's about here: http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/mfle/currentinitiatives/assessmentisforlearning/index.asp

[Tim Fredrick]

Yes, there are a ton of reasons. Thanks for the link - it will be useful in my research.

[Bronwyn G]

Reflection is such a tickly swimming thing, isn't it? Especially when applied to the field of learning, and especially when you're a student. I'm not surprised/wondering that you're in some trouble about it! As long as it's productive trouble!

I agree about the higher-level thinking skills and the ownership. I think a learning process is flawed if it is not open to those two things in particular. I used to advocate a hermetic system as a child, precisely because my teachers did ask me those hard questions. By higher-level thinking skills do you mean the Taxonomy of Bloom? Or are there other ways to actively and explicitly teach them specifically for the purposes of self-assessment?

I have been disappointed lately in student blogs I have been reading because there is virtually none of that sort of reflection, which is what I read them for. I suppose a reflective picture might build up over time.