Assessing the Self-Assessment

When I was in high school I never once was given the option of completing a self-assessment. Sure there were peer assessments and teacher assessments, but what about an assessment that forced me to take a look at my own learning, at my own progression?

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As a prospective teacher, I have learnt about the importance of AaL and its correlation to inspiring active metacognition. When completing self-assessments, students are asked to evaluate their own learning and their own engagement. It truly is an opportunity to assess for the purpose of learning: you are able to see what areas you are excelling in, what areas you need to improve in. That is to say, it forces you to think, to reflect, about yourself as a learner: are you learning? What are you learning? How are you learning? What can you do to learn more? We call this process of self-questioning and self-reflection, metacognition. By engaging in metacognition students are able to assess their personal strengths and weaknesses, a process, I believe, that helps to inspire intrinsic motivation.

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When we talk about intrinsic motivation, we are talking about the internal, and personal, desire to achieve, to push oneself. By engaging in self-assessments students see for themselves where they need to improve and how they can do better on their own merit, as opposed to a teacher telling them what they have done wrong or what they need to improve on. It puts the onus of learning and improving on the student, acting as personal inspiration to chart their own growth and celebrate their own achievement. As opposed to seeking to improve based on external motivation (such as a failing mark that they receive on a test) they, can instead, be fuelled by the desire to achieve something that they themselves have set. And, by engaging in the process of setting goals based on self-assessed performance and improving on weaknesses, self-assessment also emerges as a tool for AfL, as students use their evaluations to better themselves as learners, as students, taking an active step towards bettering their achievement.

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Aside from promoting AaL and AfL, self-assessement tools also aid teachers in AoL. Often times, I believe, teachers depend on the milieu to gauge whether students understand what they're learning and wait until formal assessments to see that, in fact, their students did not understand what they taught. You know what I'm talking about, when a teacher asks if everyone understands and everyone casually shakes their head in agreeance as not to disrupt the classroom order or outcast themselves. But with self-assessments, teachers can alleviate this phenomenon. It allows the teacher to truly see if every student in his/ her classroom has engaged with the material, if they understand it, as the assessment is personal, unaffected by the all too familiar social pressure of "just saying you understand so we can move on." 

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I think that completing a self-assessment at the end of every class will be a very helpful tool in my future classroom. It will allow me to see if I have met my learning objectives (AoL), if every student has grasped the lesson to the point where we can move on. And, if the assessments prove otherwise, it allows me to plan ahead for the next class (AfL), to ensure that I start off the class with a review of the previous lesson, going over any questions or extreme areas of difficulty. In doing this, I believe that I will be giving students equal rights to achieve.

Here is a link to a document that looks at what successful self-assessment looks like and aims to do:
http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/literacynumeracy/inspire/research/studentselfassessment.pdf