Students' self-assessment of assignments-is it worth it?

Nurse Education Today, 2007

Student self-assessment is widely reported to offer numerous advantages to the learner. It is a popular practice for empowering students and the advantages are claimed to incorporate increased dialogue between students and teachers and the development of skills that encompass critical awareness and reflectivity. It is, potentially, a process that may enable health care practitioners to be lifelong learners, equipped with the skills for autonomy in learning and professional practice. As such it might be viewed as an essential element of the curriculum. This paper reports on a study designed to evaluate the implementation of self-assessment among student health care practitioners. The pilot study examined the impact of self-assessment on learning and how the process was perceived by students and staff. Findings indicated that a varied approach had been taken to its implementation, which had significant repercussions in the way in which it was perceived by students. Similarly, there was a varied approach taken by students to the process of self-assessment and this had significant repercussions for its overall value as a learning tool. The outcomes of this study provide a sound rational for maintaining and expanding the practice of student self-assessment and important lessons for the process of doing so.

Electronic Journal of Research in Educational Psychology, 2013

Self-assessment is one of the most customary activities in the classroom from all differ-ent educational levels. However a high percentage of teachers report not knowing how self-assessment influences students’ learning or how to implement it successfully in their classrooms. In this article two different lines of research concerning self-assessment will be analyzed (self-regulation and formative assessment) along with a new conceptualization of what self-assessment is. Later the relationship between self-assessment and the use of learning strategies by students will be examined explaining how this skill can be acquired. The last sections examine how the use of different peda-gogic strategies can enhance successful implementation of self-assessment in class-rooms.

Educational Psychology Review, 2016

This paper reviews current known issues in student self-assessment (SSA) and identifies five topics that need further research: (1) SSA typologies, (2) accuracy, (3) role of expertise, (4) SSA and teacher/curricular expectations, and (5) effects of SSA for different students. Five SSA typologies were identified showing that there are different conceptions on the SSA components but the field still uses SSA quite uniformly. A significant amount of research has been devoted to SSA accuracy, and there is a great deal we know about it. Factors that influence accuracy and implications for teaching are examined, with consideration that students’ expertise on the task at hand might be an important prerequisite for accurate self-assessment. Additionally, the idea that SSA should also consider the students’ expectations about their learning is reflected upon. Finally, we explored how SSA works for different types of students and the challenges of helping lower performers. This paper sheds light on SSA research needs to address the known unknowns in this field.

Assessment & Evaluation In Higher Education, 2013

The hypothesis that task-specific criterion-referenced self-assessment can have a positive effect on students' metacognitive engagement and learning was tested. Seventh graders (n.47) were asked to invent, apply, and explain a classification system for a group of animals. Treatment subjects periodically assessed their performance in terms of a written rubric that listed the criteria for each task and gradations of quality for each criterion. Students in the control group were not asked to assess their work. Think-aloud protocols were collected and coded to provide insight into spontaneous self-assessment, the classification of self-assessment, and the influence of self-assessment on metacognitive engagement and learning. Approximately three-quarters of the students assessed themselves spontaneously. Girls in the treatment group were more metacognitive than boys, but no statistically significant differences were found for boys in treatment and control groups. Treatment students tended to outperform the control group on posttests. The rubric appeared to have a positive effect on the criteria that students used in their spontaneous self-assessments, and students who assessed their own work were remarkably willing to revise it. An appendix contains the scoring rubric given to the experimental group. (Contains 18 tables and 109 references.) (Author/SLD)

New Directions in the Teaching of Physical Sciences, 2019

Self-assessment, whereby students are actively engaged in assessing the quality of their work, has been shown to benefit them. It is not routinely carried out in all institutions. This pilot study aimed to explore the extent to which students chose to engage with self-assessment when invited to do so, and how accurate they were when they did. A short pilot tool including qualitative and quantitative elements, was circulated to students within a school of the largest faculty of Kingston University. Students completed the self-assessment and submitted it with their completed assignments. Actual grades achieved were compared with self-assessments. Qualitative data were analysed using basic thematic analysis. The highest average marks achieved were in the group who correctly self-assessed their work. More students incorrectly self-assessed than correctly assessed their work, and almost a third of students did not engage with the activity. Those who incorrectly over-assessed their work h...

SAGA: Journal of English Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics

In the current education context that encourages students to be independent learners, self-assessments have gained more attention as one of the effective ways to support self-learning. However, teachers in Indonesia seem hesitant to use self-assessments because they assume that students cannot understand and perform self-assessments. Therefore, the research is aimed to know about undergraduate students' perceptions toward self-assessments, which can result in knowing students' comprehension of self-assessments. The research was conducted at an English Language Education Program (ELEP) from one of the private universities in Central Java, which involved 42 students from the 2018 academic year who had passed Teaching Skills Courses (Teaching English for Young Learners, Teaching English for Adult Learners, and Teaching English for Specific Purposes). A questionnaire consisting of close-ended and open-ended questions was used to collect the data, and the data were analyzed using...

Journal of English Language Studies

This study aims to discover how undergraduate students conducted self-assessments of their learning process and outcomes, and how much doing self-assessment could contribute to the learning achievement. This research applied a qualitative method. The authors utilized interviews to collect data and wrote them down as the results of the analysis. Based on the results of the interviews, six students responded to the survey regarding conducting selfassessment in the learning process revealing that the benefit of doing self-assessment for students was that they could introspect themselves in the learning process, the selfassessment had significantly contributed to time management during the learning process. In addition, selfassessment could motivate students to improve their ability to learn from previous results. Students could also evaluate what had been done in the learning process. Evaluation results were also significant for students in conducting selfassessments. Hence, students understood the extent of their ability to learn, which was better or worse than before, in every problem during the study process. 1989: 529). Moreover, it also applies to the definition of requirements and guidelines to be applied to their work and to the degree to which they must follow certain guidelines and requirements (Boud, 1995: 4). Thus, self-assessment is closely related to problems of strength, control and authority, as well as the degree to which they are passed from academic staff to students (Brew, 1999). This form of selfassessment will occur when students assess the results of their work to improve their performance and when they identify the difference of current desired performances.

Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 2013

One of the implicit aims of higher education is to enable students to become better judges of their own work. This paper examines whether students who voluntarily engage in self-assessment improve in their capacity to make those judgements. The study utilises data from a web-based marking system that provides students with the opportunity to assess themselves on each criterion for each assessment task throughout a programme of study. Student marks were compared with those from tutors to plot changes over time. The findings suggest that overall students' judgements do converge with those of tutors, but that there is considerable variation across achievement levels, with weaker students showing little improvement. Whilst the study is limited by the exigencies of voluntary participation and thus consequential gaps in the data set, it shows how judgement over time can be demonstrated and points to the potential for more systematic interventions to improve students' judgements. It also illustrates the use of the web-based marking and feedback software (ReView) that has considerable utility in aiding self-assessment research.

Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice

Student self-assessment is a central component of current conceptions of formative and classroom assessment. The research on self-assessment has focused on its efficacy in promoting both academic achievement and self-regulated learning, with little concern for issues of validity. Because reliability of testing is considered a sine qua non for the validity of assessment interpretations, and research into the human ability to self-evaluate work raises concerns about the quality of students’ judgments, it is sensible to investigate the accuracy of students’ self-assessments. This article reviews relevant literature from educational psychology and psychometrics to define the need for a better understanding of accuracy in self-assessment as well as to identify possible pitfalls in measuring accuracy that could undermine its effectiveness by, for example, trading the focus on formative feedback for summative scoring or rating. The article concludes with recommendations for the design of r...