Effective strategies to involve students in self-assessments
The key to student self-assessment is helping them answer three questions: Where am I going? where am I now? How can I close the gap?
- Students put the state standard into kid-friendly language
- Turn those new standards into "I can" statements
- Students track their own formative assessments
- Students decide when they are ready for a summative assessment on any given skill
Example of students tracking their learning
Other tips:
- Show students specific examples of a skill that was executed well
- Show students examples of weak work and have them identify what was wrong
- Have students reflect on their work, compare it to quality work, and write specific goals and action plans for how they will make their work better. (For example, I will rewrite the paper with stronger transitions between paragraphs.)
- Only writing a grade on a student's paper will result in NO CHANGE when they try that assignment/skill again.
- Only writing comments will result in quality increasing by 30%.
- Writing comments AND a grade will result in NO CHANGE. The student just looks at the grade and doesn't bother to read the comments.
- Study discussing this data is published here.
Tip for writing comments:
- Comments should tell students how to close the gap between where they are and where they should be. For example, if they use "I" in a formal essay, write "Literary analysis essays should be in the 3rd person."
- Don't fix all their mistakes. For example, if I wanted a student to fix all her run-on sentences, I could highlight all the run-ons and tell her to go back and fix them. If the teacher does all the work, the student isn't learning anything.
There are a few examples below of specific ways that we can involve the students in their own assessment:
And here is an example of a rubric with some of my comments on it. Does this rubric help the student understand what she needs to fix in order to improve her essay?
My opinion:
That part about how giving grades and comments results in NO improvement was a wake up call to me. I feel like I kind of knew it in the back of my head but never took the time to think about it. I am trying to get away from giving grades. So far I've moved toward using a lot more rubrics that I underline specific parts of so the students see what they did wrong -- but I want to try using ONLY comments in the future.
I've tried a lot of different ways of having students track their formative assessments. If anyone figures out an easy, obvious way to do it, please let me know!
This is worth looking into as a whole staff. We need to make student progress and assessment transparent to students so that they know exactly where they need to improve. This would help them see themselves improving with every skill, which is so helpful in motivating them to continue (or to start) working hard.
ReplyDeleteThis is the heart of skills based grading - making students responsible for their own learning. I don't necessarily agree with the idea that students should break down state standards into student-friendly language. I think that's the teacher's job. Here's a breakdown of what I think the roles should be:
ReplyDeleteThe teacher should:
* Break down standards into student-friendly skills
* Clearly define how skills will be assessed (rubrics, performance tasks, etc.)
* Provide multiple examples of good work, bad work
* Provide meaningful comments on work to guide skill improvement
The teacher and student should:
* Discuss the meaning of skills, rubrics
* Grade example work and discuss the meaning of quality work
The student should:
* Complete and revise work based on teacher comments
* Track their own progress
* Decide when they are ready for a summative assessment
Basically, there is a lot of work teachers have to do before the class starts, which pays off as the students assume most of the responsibility during the school year. And the teachers' burden is reduced if they collaborate with other teachers for defining standards, creating performance tasks, etc. Am I missing anything? Anybody disagree?