Self Assessment
We must constantly remind ourselves that the ultimate purpose of evaluation is to have students become self-evaluating. If students graduate from our schools still dependent upon others to tell them when they are adequate, good, or excellent, then we’ve missed the whole point of what education is about.
Costa and Kallick. If Minds Matter: a Forward to the Future 1992
See also their Leading and Learning with Habits of Mind
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Thank you, Charlie. For those who may not know… Charlie McCarthy is a name under which people who do not have a blogging account may post. The secret? Scroll to the bottom of the page and log in as username: charlie and password: charlie.
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Thanks for focusing attention on self-assessment! I hope for much more discussion on this topic here in the future.
Today, before I found your post, I had asked my students to self-assess their expected result on an ESOL grammar test right before they took it. I gave them post-it notes for their responses. On the notes, I also asked them to record how long they had studied and which parts of the test they expected to be hardest and easiest.
After I graded the test, I discovered that most students had been remarkably accurate, and I attached their post-it notes to their test papers for their consideration in the next class session.
Although I’ve been pushing along on the theme for a while, I don’t think everyone really “feels” yet why internal evaluation matters. But, I have a few more weeks, and I’ll keep encouraging the process.
I really like your approach, Margaret. When I teach composition, I have students grade their own papers before turning them in using the rubric that I’ll use to grade them. I find that students grade themselves fairly accurately (or more harshly than I ), too.
I wonder if you’ve ever thought about doing something as wacky as this: using an objective test as a self-assessment and having an evaluation of that earn the actual grade.
For example: have students take the grammar test, correct it in class, then write a little report on what they did incorrectly, why it was incorrect, and what strategies they need to take to fix the error in the future. The grade they get for this particular “assignment” is not the score on the test, but a score on their report.
I used to do this for a grammar course that was online. I adopted the approach to address the problem of cheating in online classes. But it worked beautifully as metacognitive activity as well. And it takes test anxiety out of the equation since the grade is not based on performance on the test.