Diving into Self-Assessment

After looking at the role of the student in formative assessment, today I am looking more closely at the practice of self-assessment with the help of "Promoting Learning and Achievement through Self-assessment" by Heidi Andrade (an Associate Professor of educational Psychology, the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and the school of Education at the University at Albany, and the co-editor of the Handbook of Formative Assessment).

Andrade delineates self-assessment from self-evaluation (terms that, until now, I have always used interchangeably) by explaining that "self assessment is done on work in progress in order to inform revision and improvement: it is not a matter of having students determine their own grades.  Self-evaluation, in contrast, refers to asking students to grade their own work, perhaps as part of their final grade for an assignment."  By this definition, self-assessment is purely formative in nature, while self-evaluation is more summative.

The purpose of self-assessment is two-fold: (1) "to boost learning and achievement" and (2) "to promote academic self regulation, or the tendency to monitor and manage one's own learning," focusing on both content and meta-cognition.

Andrade offers eight features for effective self assessment to occur.

Students need:

•  awareness of the value of self-assessment;
• access to clear citeria on which to base the assessment;
• a specific task or performance to assess;
• models of self-assessment;
• direct instruction in and assistance with self-assessment;
• practice;
• cues regarding when it is appropriate to self-assess; and
• opportunities to revise and improve the task or performance.

 Though eight features seems like a large number, most of the items on this list will be intuitive in the instruction process, since self-assessment is a skill, just like any other academic skill, that needs to be taught and practiced in order for students to maximize its effectiveness.
 
Though the guidelines above are helpful, the info that I found most helpful was her explanation of the general process that she uses when she has students self assess.  It has three parts: articulate expectations, self-assessment, and revision.

In order to articulate expectations, Andrade states that she "often co-create all or part of a rubric in class by analyzing examples or strong and weak pieces of student work." By interacting with models and discovering criteria, students have a deeper understanding of the specific task and its performance indicators and how to evaluate the effectiveness or lack of effectiveness of different approaches.   I like to do this with my students to analyze the genre characteristics of a piece of writing before having them begin their own writing assignment (See Writing Outside Their Comfort Zone for examples of what this process looks like).  The rubric is personal to them because they helped to create it and there is much less student confusion about what each element of the rubric is talking about.  Furthermore, students feel empowered to be successful on the assignment because they know what successful looks like.

In order to have students self-assess writing, Andrade asks students "to use colored pencils to underline key phrases in the rubric, then underline in their drafts the evidence of having met the standard articulated by the phrase."  For example, if the rubric called for using varied transition, students would underline this statement on their rubric in orange and then underline their transitions in orange.  If the paper lacks transitions or the transitions are not varied, students can write themselves a note to address this before they turn in their final draft.  One thing that I like about this is that it ties the rubric closely to the self-assessment process and gives something specific to self-assess. 

For revision, Andrade states that "students are savvy, and will not self-assess thoughtfully unless they know that their efforts can lead to opportunities to actually make improvements and possibly increase their grades." 

According  to the research on self-assessment, "actively involving students in using a rubric to self-assess their work [. . .] has been associated with noticeable improvement in students' performances in writing, social studies, mathematics, science, and external examinations."

Further Reading:

To read more about Andrade's views on rubrics, check out this article


Photo from Joanna Penn

Cultivating Classroom Climate

Photo from Matthewwells.zenfolio.com

"Formative Assessment: an Enabler of Learning" by Margaret Heritage, Assistant Director for Professional Development at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing at UCLA, summarizes the teacher's role, the student's role, and the classroom climate during formative assessment.  Though she has many helpful things to say about the teacher's role and the student's role, I gravitated toward her discussion of the classroom climate. 

According to Heritage, the classroom climate is an "essential aspect" of formative assessment, a fact which I have not seen emphasized in my other reading. She offers three aspects.

1.  "Power and responsibility in the classroom is not just the teacher's prerogative, but is distributed so that the teachers and students work together to share responsibility for learning."  While teachers are active in gathering data through multiple measures, student are not passive throughout the formative assessment process.  Instead, they are to be actively engaged in self-assessment, "generating internal feedback that tells them when they need to make adjustments to their learning strategies."  To do this, students need to first understand the learning target, which should be communicated by the teacher, and they need to know what the finished product looks like, which can be effectively accomplished through modeling and a gradual release of responsibility (as outlined by Fisher and Frey). This would also include holding students responsible for utilizing feedback, whether from themselves, their peers, or the teacher to inform their future work.  

2."The classroom has to be a safe place."  This is incredibly important for a class built around formative assessment practices.  For teachers to collect data on student weaknesses or gaps in understanding, students must be willing to share confusion and difficulty without fear of looking stupid.  Some students would rather not turn in an assignment at all rather than risk trying and "failing" at it.  One way to do this is to communicate the purpose of the formative assessment process.  Students need to understand that it is not a "gottcha" experience to prove that the student wasn't paying enough attention during instruction. Instead, it is to help establish next steps so the student can be more successful.  Also, teachers need to be clear to students about learning being a process of growth requiring endurance, not about being "right" and "getting it" immediately.   

3. "The relationships in the classroom must be supportive and collaborative, characterized by mutual trust among teachers and students."  Another element of the student's role is to engage in peer assessment, whereby "peers assess each other's learning against the same indicators that they use to check on their own learning when they are engaged in self-assessment."  To be honest, I have had mixed success with peer assessment.  When I truly reflect on my teaching practices, I have to admit that most of the time I use peer assessment as a step to force students to do one more draft of a paper or assignment before it gets to me.  My hope is that this helps to take care of some of the larger, more obvious issues in a work (ie: missing thesis statements, no internal citations, etc,), so I don't have to grade as many drafts.  This is fine, in theory, and very helpful for getting students to revisit the requirements for the assignment and look for specific aspects.  However, it does not help students to me more aware of their thinking nor does it help them to analyze and evaluating the thinking of others.  On Bloom's taxonomy, my students are identifying/recognizing when they should be on the higher levels, which means that I am cheapening the experience for them.  To improve, I need to work much more deliberately to front load through modeling, think-alouds, and shared writing.  Students need to have a full understanding of what the learning target looks like and what the performance indicators of that target should look like, so the act of peer assessment is more meaningful and increases metacognitive awareness.  



Other Margaret Heritage resources:

Video lecture- Featured presentation from the 5th Annual Iowa High School Summit
Article on Learning Progressions 
Books
Webinar Slides from presentation given in Rhode Island