Self-assessment, Student initiative, and Self-direction
Self-assessment is a key component of learning. When students reflect upon their own learning goals and assess where they are in relation to mastering those goals, they are more able to develop strategies and plans to reach mastery. Self-assessment practices facilitate student initiative and self-direction and nurture intrinsic motivation, which are a few of the many important 21st Century Learning skills that all students need.
A few colleagues in our CLASSRoad "Teaching Languages Online" course have developed a learning activity which aims to facilitate student self-direction and initiative. The activity is as follows:
All students have a check-list of course level novice learning goals/objectives phrased in “I can” statements. (e.g. I can briefly describe a family member and I can issue simple invitations to do an activity.) Students use the checklist to set goals for the semester, collect evidence of their learning and post them to a classroom wiki in order to showcase their progress. Throughout the course of the semester, students check in with their teachers and discuss their progress and strategies to use to meet their goals. (See reference here)
A list of "I can" statements for each unit of study is indeed an effective tool to nurture student self-reflection and mastery of learning outcomes if done consistently throughout the year. However, merely having a checklist of "I can" statements along with tools to collect evidence of learning is not enough. There are other factors that need to be considered if one is to utilize "I can" statements and have students reflect upon them effectively. Being mindful of student age levels and peer pressure are quite important when designing the checklists that student will be using and the process of self-reflection.
Considerations for Self-assessment for Younger Students
I teach very young students - grades K-6. Here are a few changes I would make in order to adopt this activity to my teaching goals and my particular classroom context.
1) "I can" statements must be written in very simple student-friendly language. Some of my students cannot read yet or very well (i.e. think of a grade 1 or 2 student), so the statements must be free of technical jargon or grammatical terms that confuse and impede self-reflection.
2) Students must be taught what mastery of that learning outcome looks like, sounds like, and feels like - particularly those who are younger. At this age level, student think in very concrete ways, so offering exemplars of what various mastery levels of a learning outcome (i.e. an "I can" statement) and explaining them to students will aid them when doing the self-reflection.
3) The self-reflection form itself should be simple, positive, and student friendly. For example, if a student is assessing hem/herself against a learning outcome, a "Yes/Not Yet" is probably more positive than a "Yes/No." Depicting various levels of mastery in the form of images displaying the growth of a plant might be more effective and simpler to comprehend than a likert scale of 1 to 5. In addition, a graphic that visually shows growth emphasizes that learning is all about growth and is never something absolute - it is always relative, dynamic, time- and context-dependent.
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| Images of plant growth can symbolize various levels of mastery for a particular learning outcome. So the images above from left to right could represent "Beginning-Intermediate-Advanced-Mastery" respectively (or any other verbal scale). |
4) A safe and caring classroom environment must be maintained so that students do not feel the need to be dishonest in their self-assessment. If students fear that they will be judged by their classmates and ridiculed because of grading themselves lowly on a self-assessment, then they will tend to always grade themselves higher than they should. Peer pressure and fear of being judged negatively by others could destroy the process of self-assessment.
5) Teachers must give students feedback over their self-assessment to ensure that students can see how well and accurately they are assessing themselves. One way to do this is to give students and checklist, have them self-assess, then have the teacher assess the student and return both assessments - the teacher's and the student's - for comparison. When a student see his/her own self-assessment along side his/her teacher's, then they are more likely to reflect on how honest they were in their assessment.
The same level of teacher feeback must be given when student select evidence that demonstrate their learning to be placed in their portfolio. Students should be able to determine of a piece of work really reflects that level of mastery. Otherwise, the self-assessment process has failed.
Considerations in a Distance Learning Environment
In a distance learning classroom environment, self-assessment could be easier in some ways but more difficult in others. For example, the somewhat anonymous nature of online instruction may eliminate the negative effect of peer pressure on student's self-reflection practices and may cause students to give more truthful self-evaluations. However, it may be difficult for teachers to assist students in their self-assessment, model the process, and give feedback due to the clear separation of time and space and absence of face-to-face student-teacher interaction.
We all know that when learning goes to an online environment, there is always an accompanying challenge related to using the online tools needed to create and manage student work. Aside from this obvious digital learning curve, appropriate tools still must be in place to ensure that student are not confused about the self-assessment process and to provide clear examples of what each level of mastery looks like and which pieces of student work would represent them.
Choosing the right technological tools, platforms, and LMS can aid in facilitating student self-assessment. Some LMS come with survey features built-in where teachers and students can both reflect and provide feedback. In this case, students can view their own assessment in comparison to their teacher's, which in itself is a powerful way of teaching and improving the accuracy of self-assessment. Moroever, teachers need some way of tracking student self-assessment and maintaining records of their progress against particular learning outcomes. Some LMSs provide learning outcome management and alignment tools and other useful features in simple and visual interfaces.
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