Report #2
FIPP Activity Report
Funded by the Basic Skills Initiative
Name Elise Geraghty
Date 11/17/09
FIPP Partner Nelson Espinola
Section #6235
Activity /Strategy Self-assessments on quizzes, homeowork and essays.
Category Providing Feedback and Evaluation (IV)
Briefly describe the activity/strategy.
1. Introduction All semester the students have been asked to turn over their
quizzes and write, very briefly, how they believe they did on the quiz and why.
They also do this for essays, but more comprehensively; they are provided with
a rubric to fill out for self-evaluation.
2. Set up & Supplies for essays: rubrics created specifically for each essay.
3. Directions The students are asked to assess how they did on a given
assignment; they are discouraged from say "I don't know how I did," but rather
encouraged to be very aware of their preparation and performance level. They
are asked to add why they believe they performed as well (or as poorly) as
they did.
4. Conclusion It helped me a lot to see how students were viewing their own
performance, but I believe they benefited as well. I feel that it put more
responsibility on the student and forced them to say, "wow, I haven't been
prepared for the past four quizzes," or "I did great on this quiz--I actually spent
hours reading the material and it paid off!"
What worked well? The quizzes, in particular, lent themselves to this exercise; they're
immediate and pretty matter of fact. Either you know the answer or you don't, so there's
no hiding from the performance reality.
What would you change? I'm still working on self-evaluation guidelines for essays; these
feel more "subjective" to students and it's more difficult for them to self-evaulate an
"effective thesis," than it is to notice the number of correct vocabulary identifications.
I'm working to make the self-eval for essays more objective.
Would you use the activity/strategy again? Why or why not? I'll continue to use it; most
students seem to like it, and do it naturally without being reminded. It has increased
communication with me and the students, particfularly the students who don't speak up
in class.
Please describe any student learning outcomes/changes that you observed after the
implementation of the activity/strategy. I noticed a lot of "apologies" that came on of the
back-of-quiz assessments; what this tells me is that the student is aware of the problem
if there is a problem. Also, they could usually identify what went wrong: "I didn't
annotate well." Since one of our SLO's for this class is to comprehend a multiparagraph text, it's important for the student to remember what practices facilitate this
understanding and to get immediate feedback as to what happens when particular
strategies are not used.