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  “We can’t improve what we don’t assess”

Michael Hyatt

This blog is based on how teachers can implement self-assessment as part of the learning and evaluation process. Self-assessment is an important skill to achieve a meaningful learning in our students. Through self-assessment students develop the habit of the self-reflection to improve and become responsible for their own learning. if the goal of learning is for learners to be self-sufficient and independent, then training and experience in self-assessment are needed.  

ABOUT US 

We are students from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras. Our names are: Nelson Matute, Odalis Aguilera, and Luis Amaya and we are currently in our senior year as graduates of Foreign Languages Career with orientation in teaching English.  As part of a project from our class Work-shop Didactics II, we create this Blog based on the topic Using Self-assessment for evaluation.

This video shows why is important to implement self-assessment as part of the learning and evaluation process. 

You can also watch this video 

You can also find information here

Self-assessment power point presentation

https://www.slideshare.net/nelsonmatute1/didactics-presentation-88244764

You can also read more information here

This table show us the benefits of self-assessment

 key words about self-assessment 

This is the cycle of how students can implement the self-assessment. 

SUMMARY

What is self-assessment?

Self-assessment is when students reflect on their own work and judge how well they have performed in relation to the assessment criteria. According to Heidi Andrade & Anna Valtcheva (2009) Self-assessment allows students to judge their own performance and be able to monitor or check their own learning. The focus is not necessarily on having students generate their own grades, but rather providing opportunities for them to be able to identify what constitutes a good or poor piece of work. 

Purposes of self-assessment

• Self-assessment is a prerequisite for a self- directed  learner. If a goal of learning is for learners to be self-sufficient and independent in language use, then training and experience in self-assessment are needed.

• Self-assessment can raise learners’ awareness of language, effective ways of learning, and their own performance and needs.

• Self-assessment increases motivation and goal orientation in learning.

• Some aspects of language learning, such as effort and learner beliefs, can only be assessed through self-assessment.

• Self-assessment can reduce the teacher’s workload.  

Self-assessment instruments

Self-assessment instruments that produce quantitative information that can be used for evaluation purposes fall into two categories: 

1. Global self-assessments 

2. Self- marking instruments

Global self-assessment 

Global self-assessment according to Oskarsson (1980) could be conducted through rating scales and checklists.  However, both of these, as Oskarsson suggests, are very problematic.

Examples of questions used to measure learner´s speaking ability:

• Give yourself a rating for your speaking skills on a scale of 0 to 10, where 10 means I am completely fluent in English and 0 means I cannot speak English at all.

• Can you ask someone to help you to arrange an appointment with a doctor?

These questions may seem fairly straightforward. But if we were to apply Oskarsson’s question format to teaching, we would produce questions such as:

• Give yourself a rating for your classroom management skills as a teacher on a scale of 0 to 10, where 10 is a perfect classroom manager and 0 is a complete incompetent.

• Can you explain the meaning of behave?

For all of the items, we as teachers probably feel that our answer depends on the teaching situation or maybe we just plumped for a number in the middle of the range. 

This type of self-assessment instrument lacks specificity and is divorced from reality. Instead of rating any real-world language performance, learners are asked to rate their own beliefs and perceptions with little or no evidence on which to base their assessments.

Self- marking instruments

Self-marking involves learners in giving themselves a score for a piece of work. Where the task is objective, such as a multiple-choice exercise, an answer key can be provided, and learners can mark their own work easily.  The learning benefits of this approach are, however, negligible.

For open-ended tasks, where there may be a very large number of possible answers, self-marking is more problematic because only the marks from the self-assessment are hardly reliable enough to persuade teachers to include them as part of the final score for a course. 

To increase reliability, self-assessment on open-ended tasks needs to be clearly guided by detailed scoring criteria. The easiest way to generate such criteria is to break down the task into smaller components.

For example, for a letter-writing task, the finished product could be self-marked for how well it follows the standard letter-writing conventions, such as introducing the purpose of the letter in the first paragraph, assigning each topic to a separate paragraph, and so on. The close guidance of scoring criteria such as these is likely to increase the reliability of the learner’s self- assessment, making it more palatable for inclusion in the final score for a course.

Data-driven global assessments

The use of objective tasks and detailed scoring criteria for self-marking, as described above, are restricted to self-assessment of particular tasks. Such self-assessment may be included in the overall score for a course. To obtain a measurement of a learner’s development throughout a course, self-assessment at a more global level is needed.

For global self-assessment, what things could be used as data driving the self-assessment?

Portfolios

The most obvious and widely-used learning instrument that could be used as input for self- assessment is the portfolio. Since the portfolio is evidence to learners of their own efforts, progress, and achievements, it is suitable for self-assessment. To use a portfolio as self- assessment for evaluation purposes, questions to guide the self-assessment must be provided. Sample questions could include the following:

• To what extent did you achieve your goals in learning during this course?
• To what extent did you improve your reading? List some of the problems you faced while reading and how you solved those problems.
• To what extent has your knowledge of vocabulary improved? List the new words you have learnt from your portfolio.
• To what extent has your confidence in using English improved?

By answering these questions, learners have concrete evidence of their performance and are not forced to rely on their intuition and possible bias about their performance or ability.

Pre- and post-course writing

A second way of conducting data-driven, rather than intuition-driven, global self-assessments is to use the time-honoured research technique of pre- and post-tests. Learners can be asked to write two essays about their attitudes towards learning English, one at the start and another at the end of the course. Comparing the two, learners are able to see the extent of their development through the course. With guiding questions, learners’ perceptions of their own development based on the pre- and post-course writing can provide self-assessment that can be used for evaluation purposes.

Learner contracts

A third potential instrument for global self- assessment is the learner contract (e.g., Dickinson 1987). At the start of a course, learners identify two or three goals they want to achieve in the course, tasks and materials that can be used to reach these goals, and ways of measuring the extent to which the goals have been reached. A learner contract, then, provides an organized series of tasks throughout a course and makes attaining specific goals an integral part of the learning process. The choice of goals in learner contracts can be left to the learner or can be controlled by the teacher to match the objectives of the course in order to be used as a valid part of the overall evaluation of learners in the course.

Conclusion

Self-assessment is a valuable tool in the teacher’s repertoire of techniques that enhance learning. Self-assessment can be done by basing on concrete evidence of the learner’s performance and by giving guidelines on how to conduct the self-assessment. In these ways, self-assessment can become more reliable and fulfill an important role in providing learner input into evaluation for a course.

You can read  more information here

MIND MAP 

You can find more specific information in our mind-map 

Reflecting Questions

1. What are the purposes for using self-assessment?
2. Why is global self-assessment and self-marking considered problematic ?
3. What is the purpose of using portfolios? And what questions must be include?
4. What is  pre- and post-course writing? 
5. What is learner contract? Give one example
6. Give your own explanation of self-assessment for evaluation?

 REFERENCES

We summarized the article of RICHARD WATSON TODD an associate professor in applied linguistics at King Mongkut´s University of Technology Thonburi in Bangkok,Thailand. 

Andrade, H., & Valtcheva, A. (2009). Promoting Learning and Achievement Through. Theory Into Practice, 48:1, 12-19.

Dickinson, L. (1987). Self-instruction in Language Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Oskarsson, M. (1980). Approaches to Self-assessment in Foreign Language Learning . Oxford : Pergamon Press, Originally Publish by Council of Europe.

Todd, R. W. (2002, January). Using Self-assessment for Evaluation. English Teaching Forum Magazine , 40(1).