The term self-assessment likely conjures up different images for different people.
Some people might think of doing a self-help quiz in Cosmo, while others picture a student
checking their spelling test, and still others imagine a student using a checklist to evaluate
their work before turning it in.
Self-assessment is more than just a way to save a teacher from having to check a quiz,
and it’s more than a checklist to make sure all parts of an assignment are complete before
handing it in.
Effective self-assessment by the student also provides the teacher with evidence about student
perceptions of their learning.
The teacher and student can then use all of this information to set the criteria for success
and to create a clear outline of the path to success.
So what goes into effective self-assessment besides a well done checklist or rubric?
Arthur Costa, Ed.D and Bena Kallick, Ph.
D have described 16 habits of mind.
A "Habit of Mind is an effective behavior used while solving problems for which there
are no immediate answers.
Three of these habits of mind are directly tied to self-assessment: thinking about our
thinking (or metacognition), persistence and being open to continuous learning.Thinking
about our thinking, or metacognition is the ability to be conscious of our thinking in
a given situation and then to evaluate the productiveness of our own thinking skills
and strategies.
By assessing what they know and don’t know, students identify their own baseline so that
they can then identify ways to improve their work.
Not only is this self-assessment helpful for making future improvements, it also allows
students to make mid-course corrections if something is not going as planned.
This will be a new skill for many students, and they will need to practice before it becomes
second nature.
You can help students develop this skill by asking them to rate their level of confidence
in a decision or how they selected certain strategies and how those strategies worked
for them.
This is also a great time to ask students about their perceived level of effort to help
them see the connection between level of effort, selected strategies and the outcome.
Additionally, students’ perceived level of effort can help the teacher determine whether
a task needs to be adjusted to be more or less challenging.
Being able to think metacognitively is a strategy in itself that allows students to continuously
learn even in the absence of a teacher.A good partner behavior to metacognition is persistence.
Persistence enables a student to analyze a problem and develop strategies to attack the
problem.
It’s a bit of a catch 22, however, because to be persistent you need a set of strategies
and alternate strategies, but to develop a set of strategies, you need to be persistent.
When persistent, a student assesses whether the selected strategy is working throughout
an activity.
If it isn’t, they choose a different one and try again.
When students have no alternative strategies, they sometimes may show frustration, which
you are witnessing when they crumple their papers and throw them away saying, "I can't
do this," "It's too hard," or, when they write down any answer to get the task over with
as quickly as possible.
Teaching students a variety of problem solving strategies and encouraging them to use metacognition
to evaluate the use of those strategies will help to increase persistence which will further
increase the value of self-feedback.The final habit that we’ll discuss as being directly
related to self-assessment is Remaining Open to Continuous Learning.
It is only if students are open to continuous learning that receiving feedback from any
source is considered valuable.
As long as a student is open to learning, then the confidence gained from metacognition
and persistence, in combination with their curiosity, will allow them to constantly search
for new and better ways.
People with this Habit of Mind are always striving for improvement, always growing,
always learning, always modifying and improving themselves.
After all, isn’t the goal that students learn how to learn so they become lifelong
learners?
They’re not always going to be in a classroom and need to be able to learn more on their
own for personal and career growth!There are many tools and strategies that you can use
as a teacher and that you can teach students to use for self-assessment.
A simple strategy that can be used in the earliest grades up through high school is
thumbs up / thumbs down when asking students their level of confidence in an answer or
decision.
Students can display a red, yellow or green card to indicate their level of understanding.
Students can also use cards that are labeled as "still thinking" and "ready to move on."These
visual displays of a student’s self-assessment is a quick way for a teacher to see whether
to move on in the lesson or not.
Reflection journaling is another technique that provides students the opportunity for
self-reflection and illustrating their thinking pathways.
Through the use of a portfolio, whether a low-tech version or a higher tech version
using an application such as Seesaw, allows students to see their thinking progression
throughout a project, over a series or units or even over the course of a year.Whether
you go low tech or high tech, make sure to explicitly teach students how to effectively
perform and use the results of self-assessments.
If you can also help them to improve metacognition, increase persistence and remain open to continuous
learning, you’ll not only see the benefits in your classroom but you’ll give the students
skills that will help them for the rest of their lives!