Self-assessment in online environments
Why encourage students to engage in peer-assessment?
Usually, when teachers do self-assessment activities online, they refer to multiple choice quizzes that students do by themselves to check on understanding. Although this is a valid option, in this section of the training we focus on students giving effective feedback to themselves, on their own work.
It is strongly advisable that teachers plan self-assessment activities, encourage students to do them eagerly and help them understand how it can benefit their learning. Here are some of the benefits of self-assessment for students:
- Students engage critically with assessment criteria when they apply them to their own work, so they understand them to a deeper level
- It enables immediate feedback, so students don’t have to wait to get their teacher’s or peer’s feedback
- Students develop their self-reflection skills and, ultimately, their self-regulation competence; self-assessment activities promote autonomous learning and independence
- Students improve their metacognitive thinking, critical thinking skills and learn to be objective with themselves; they find the balance between being critical and honest, but not too hard on themselves
- It encourages students to check on their own understanding throughout the process
- It helps students be more aware of their strengths and weaknesses, which they can use to plan how to improve
- Students understand that assessment and learning are extremely intertwined
- Students become highly responsible for their learning; by giving pupils ownership of their learning, you’re giving them the opportunity to become more engaged with their learning process.
- Formative self-assessment takes attention away from levels and grades
In an online learning context, where students may be operating more independently than usual, it is especially necessary to work on developing your students’ self-regulation through self-assessment practices.
Empower your students to assess their own work with adequacy
Even though self-assessment activities can have great benefits for student learning, these will only apply if they are rightly designed and if the students are given the scaffolding they require, according to their levels of feedback literacy. Assessing one’s work is highly demanding for the student when done right, because it requires a deep understanding of the assessment criteria and the ability to be critical with the own work. Teachers may consider the following guidelines before asking students to perform self-assessment:
Reflection activity:
Think about your students:
- Do you think your students assess themselves? How do you know?
- Have you ever encouraged them to do so?
- Have you ever given them the tools to do it?
How to do self-assessment in online learning
Self-assessment activities in online education are very accessible for all teachers and students, since it does not require interaction or using any specific online platform. In this case, the support is not the most important; what is essential is the instrument that you provide to your students to scaffold the self-assessment.
One of the biggest challenges of self-assessment is to have students truly understand the success criteria, and what it means to achieve them with excellence. In other words, if a student does not complete a task successfully, maybe it’s because they didn’t comprehend what makes it “successful”. For example, if they are giving an oral presentation and the assessment criteria is “the language is adequate to the context”, maybe the student does not understand what that adequacy implies.
To overcome this difficulty, it’s strongly advisable to:
- plan previous activities to work on the appropriation of assessment criteria
- use rubrics to scaffold the process of identifying where the student themselves is at, and how they can get better
An assessment rubric is a document used to assess complex educational processes or results such as a debate, a presentation, a piece of writing or a project. A rubric is a matrix in the shape of a grid, which has two axes: vertical, with the assessment criteria, and horizontal, with the levels of achievement according to the corresponding results, specified in indicators specifically related to the assessment task.
Rubrics can be used by teachers or, in this case, by students themselves as a method of self-evaluation. Rubrics are a great instrument for self-assessment because the achievement indicators can help students objectively identify the level that best suits what they have done. What’s more, the learner can identify what indicator for the next level of achievement is, so they know what they must do to become better.
Using this information, students can complete the learning reflection after getting feedback; they can:
- identify what they did right
- identify what they did wrong
- set their new goals
- plan their next steps to improve
It is advisable to record this self-assessment activity and the learning reflection in each student’s learning portfolio.