LESSON 3 SELFASSESSMENT AND PEER ASSESSMENT WHAT IS SELF-ASSESSMENT? • Student self-assessment involves students describing and evaluating the processes and products of their learning. • Students evaluate the work they have produced and reflect on processes, actions and activities that contributed to the production of the work. • Student self-assessment can support students to regulate their own learning by requiring them to monitor how they are working and encouraging them to modify their approach if something is not working as well as it could. WHAT IS SELF-ASSESSMENT? • Self-assessment can also enhance students’ selfefficacy (a student’s belief that they are able to succeed at a given task) and support ownership of learning. • The capacity for self-regulation is linked to higher achievement as well as improved motivation and engagement. • Effective learners tend to self-assess the quality of their work more regularly than less effective learners and are also better able to incorporate evidence from other sources to make judgments on their learning. • Self-assessment is a key part of Assessment for Learning where reflection during the flow of learning is used to improve learning and teaching. WHAT IS PEER ASSESSMENT • Peer assessment is the assessment of students' work by other students of equal status. • Students often undertake peer assessment in conjunction with formal self-assessment. • They reflect on their own efforts, and extend and enrich this reflection by exchanging feedback on their own and their peers' work. • Peer assessment is a powerful meta-cognitive tool. It engages students in the learning process and develops their capacity to reflect on and critically evaluate their own learning and skill development. WHAT IS PEER ASSESSMENT • It supports the development of critical thinking, interpersonal and other skills, as well as enhancing understanding within the field of knowledge of a discipline. • Peer and group assessment are also often undertaken together. Typically, the members of a group assess the performance of their peers in terms of their contribution to the group work THE BENEFITS OF SELF AND PEERASSESSMENT • Increase student engagement and empower students, and enable greater autonomy from the teacher. • Improve learning outcomes: quality feedback in particular is associated with substantial learning gains. • Reduce the gap between the highest and lowest achievers, while raising achievement overall. • Support more equitable outcomes for all students. • Improve motivation and perseverance, and encourage students to seek and know where to find help. • Develop students’ self-regulation skills and metacognition (understanding how they learn best). • Give students a strong sense of self-efficacy for developing their own effective study habits. • Enrich students’ reasoning and improve their communication skills. • Help students understand and apply quality criteria to their work. • Create a more egalitarian and supportive classroom environment. HOW TO SET UP SUCCESSFUL SELFASSESSMENT EXPLAIN THE BENEFITS OF SELF-ASSESSMENT. Students who are more convinced of the learning benefits of self-assessment and feel supported to undertake self-assessments are more likely to be rigorous and accurate when undertaking self-assessments. EXPLICITLY TEACH STUDENTS HOW TO SELF-ASSESS AND PROVIDE ONGOING SUPPORT. Many students do not innately know how to selfassess. Teachers need to directly teach student show to self-assess and provide opportunities for students to practice self-assessment and receive feedback and assistance. ALLOW STUDENTS TO CONTRIBUTE TO CREATING STANDARDS OR CRITERIA. When students contribute to the creation of standards or criteria they tend to be more engaged and more invested in the self-assessment process HOW TO SET UP SUCCESSFUL SELFASSESSMENT CREATE A POSITIVE, TRUSTING CLASSROOM CULTURE. Students are more likely to accurately self-assess when they feel their classroom is a safe space and that they will not be judged. Consider keeping self-assessments private. USE SELF-ASSESSMENT AS A FORMATIVE NOT A SUMMATIVE ASSESSMENT TOOL. Self-assessment is most successful when it is used as a formative assessment tool and students know it won’t count towards their grades. CONSIDER USING A RUBRIC. Research has found greater learning results from self-assessment when more complex judgments are used. Rubrics are one way of achieving this. FOLLOW UP SELF-ASSESSMENTS WITH STUDENT-TEACHER LEARNING CONVERSATIONS. Providing opportunities for students to discuss their selfassessments with a teacher enhances the impact of self-assessment. PITFALLS TO AVOID IN SELF-ASSESSMENT 2. OVER OR UNDER ESTIMATING ONE’S ABILITY 1. A LACK OF TRUST AND SOCIAL PRESSURE If self-assessment is made public, some Most people have a tendency to be unrealistically optimistic about our own abilities and to believe that we are above average. students will over-estimate their level of understanding or their grades to avoid public shame, or to enhance or protect their self-worth 3. INSUFFICIENT KNOWLEDGE TO ACCURATELY SELF-ASSESS Without sufficient knowledge it is difficult for students to accurately self-assess. This is particularly the case for novice learners who do not yet have the knowledge base to accurately self-assess their current learning or the work they are producing. 5. STUDENTS’ WILLINGNESS TO SELF-ASSESS Students sometimes are unwilling to self-assess. This might be because they feel they lack the necessary skills to accurately judge their work, they are afraid of being wrong or they prefer an expert to assess their progress and work. 4. STUDENTS MAY NOT BE OLD ENOUGH Younger students might be less able to accurately selfassess ASSESSMENT TOOLS FOR PEER AND SELFASSESSMENT Rubrics are an assessment tool which include two types of information: RUBRICS •a list of criteria for assessing the important goals of the task •a scale for grading the different levels of achievement in each of the criteria, with a description for each qualitative level. JOURNALS A learning journal is a place for students to reflect in writing about how their learning is going, what they need help with, and the effectiveness of different strategies for learning. ASSESSMENT TOOLS FOR PEER AND SELFASSESSMENT PORTFOLIOS SCRIPTS Scripts consist of specific questions that are structured into a clear progression of steps, to guide learners in how best to achieve a task. They explicitly detail the ‘self-talk’ that accompanies working through a task. A portfolio is a student-managed collection of work which demonstrates the student’s learning and developing competence. ASSESSMENT TOOLS FOR PEER AND SELFASSESSMENT PAIRED EXIT CARDS An exit card is a small piece of card or a post-it given to each student at the end of a lesson, on which they write a comment to self-assess what they have learned in the lesson and what they need more help with. MARKING In paired marking, pairs of students interchange and assess work. This might mean using a rubric, or applying success criteria to each other’s work. ASSESSMENT TOOLS FOR PEER AND SELFASSESSMENT DIRT( DEDICATED IMPROVEMENT AND REFLECTION TIME) TRAFFIC LIGHTS Traffic lights are a simple system for students to use to indicate their perceived understanding of particular work. Using a traffic light icon, students label their work green, yellow, or red according to whether they think they have good (green), partial (yellow), or little (red) understanding. This is a time in the lesson in which the only goal is for students to read and make use of feedback they have received. Every student will need to have plenty of documented feedback (from themselves, the teacher, and peers) that they can respond to. THANK YOU AND GOD BLESS!
