By: Samah Sabra
A couple of years ago, a friend challenged me to get students involved in their own assessment. While I like to think of myself as someone who is willing to take risks in teaching, has a great attitude toward students and believes that anyone, if given enough support and time, can learn anything, I was hesitant about this whole self-assessment thing. My initial hesitation came from a narrow focus on content and the sense that students simply would not be able to assess their own knowledge of the subject or to provide one another with the same degree of feedback I would give them. In the span of the last two years, I have become a big advocate for student self-assessment, which extends beyond content. This change began as a result of circumstance, but quickly became a deliberate pedagogical practice.
How, you might ask, can a type of assessment enter into your repertoire of teaching tools by accident? Well, my big confession is that during a crunch time last year when I had to get mid-term grades to students around the same time that I had to get my final dissertation submitted to FGPA, I remembered my friend’s challenge. Along with realizing this might be a time-saver, I thought “Every time I have put my trust in students, they have surprised me, so why not take a risk on this?” Given that I was a beginner to this task, I was not sure how to approach it, so I thought I would start with something simple as a starting point to determine if and how to revise the task. I gave each student a cue-card and asked that they give themselves a grade out of 10 for classroom participation and write a brief paragraph justifying that grade. The “risk” I took was to promise that I would not alter the grade they gave themselves – if I was going to try this, I had to create the optimal conditions of trust so they would not be anxious about my response to their assigned grade.
The results were amazing! Here I was afraid students might over-inflate their grades, but this was most definitely not the case. In fact, many students tended to be harsher on their own performance than I would have been. I was also struck by the differences in how students approached the open-ended task I gave them. For some, the grade was justified by whether they came to class and spoke. For other students, however, the paragraph they wrote illustrated a deeply engaged reflection on their own learning process. I learned a lot of things about the students which helped me become a more engaging and effective instructor, so I decided to run the same task at the end of the winter term and found, once again, that I was amazed at the results.
The critical thing I learned from the experience was the importance of giving students the time (and, for some, the structure) to engage in reflections on their own learning. This year, I included a self-assessment task part way through the term again, but I spent some time considering how to set it up in such a way that students who were not already in the habit of transformative reflection would be given a learning structure that moved them toward that outcome – one that I consider to be desirable both in and outside of class. I created a self-assessment form that asked students to assign themselves a grade on a five-point scale for such things as preparedness for class, contributions to classroom discussions and attentiveness to other students’ contributions. Along with this standard assessment, I asked students to do the following: “Choose one area where you would like to improve your learning or performance and use the space below to explain: (1) why you think have had trouble with this area up to now, (2) a plan of how you can improve your performance or learning, and (3) what help you might need to meet your goal.”
Reading students’ responses to this question has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my teaching career thus far. Most students have exceeded my expectations, but I also have found that once they articulate their own learning goals, they genuinely and thoughtfully take up the task of improving their own learning. They are, in other words, learning how to learn: identifying what they needed to do differently in order to improve their own learning and redesigning their study strategies. Many spoke about the importance of pushing their own boundaries, learning things that might be uncomfortable, and working on such things as overcoming fears of public speaking – and they developed and applied strategies for doing so. Also rewarding was the way in which some students used this reflection as a way to reach out to me as an instructor, asking if it would be possible to include more visuals on my lecture slides, for example. This has meant that along with them, I have started to learn and develop new ways of communicating material. With no hesitations, I would say this has made me a better instructor and has made my classroom more welcoming to students with learning and communication styles that are different from my own.