Another Student-Involved Assessment Experiment [ACTIVITY]

I had middle students choose their own comments for the progress report (unless they were failing in which case I had comments that I had to relate). I know that they took this task seriously and reflected on their own evaluation. Students knew what their parents valued and frankly I would not know that organization, for example, was the most important thing to relate.

It opened up discussion that otherwise might have gone unsaid, for example I often put the code 087 - a pleasure to teach and I can remember on a few occasions I told students that they had to choose something else as they often made teaching difficult with their distractions. This facilitated improvement in a positive way.

Hi Bill,

Although I like the fact that students taking ownership of their learning through assessment, I wonder if we can take it one step further by helping students assess each other's pattern of learning. Thus, it will not help them making constructive citicism but also self-reflection on their own learning and progress.

In elmentary we use writing seminar where these 1st to 3rd graders work on writing pieces with teacher, then by themselves, then with peer editing. After the presentation, each child get two stars and a wish as part of their peer evaluation. Wonder what would happen if this is applied with secondary students and their learning?

JH

Bill,

I had created this comment for your other post on self-assessment (http://blog.williamferriter.com/2013/02/16/my-middle-schoolers-actually-...)

but I found that I was unable to post there.

I am responding to both Ariel's comment there and to your ideas.

Ariel,

You can definitely utilize this type of self-assessment with ELA, just as well as one can with Bill's science curriculum. If you look in your state standards document, they should break down the larger standards, such as writing a persuasive essay into more detail. Also, they should have the expectations in the state standards broken down by grade level. In other words, a persuasive essay at the fifth grade level may not need to address counter-arguments, but the students will need to do this at say the seventh grade level. All of these elements can be incorporated into the self-assessment.

When I have my adult ELLs learn how to have a debate in English about a controversial topic, I supply sentence starters (Donnelly and Roe, 2010) for them to use, so they began to learn the subtleties of the language, such as statements that help them to forcefully disagree versus statements that were more finessed disagreements. I created a chart that allows them to self-assess and me to also assess their understanding and performance, using Bill's model. The first time they have a debate with me, both the student and I assess their performance in terms of “Were they able to make one statement that disagreed, one statement that agreed, and one statement that built upon someone else's idea?” I also elicit in their self-evaluation how much they feel like they understood each of these types of statements. For this particular lesson, I also have them self-assess how well they understood the article and understood and could use the vocabulary. For the next lesson, the standard is a bit higher. Now, I want them to tell me how comfortable they are using these sentence starters for each category. I think the trick is in matching the self-assessment to the state standards, as Bill is suggesting, and to match the self-assessment to what your students should be able to do at this point in the instructional sequence.

An excellent resource for learning more about classroom-based assessment and student self-assessment that is chock full of charts and examples is by Gottlieb (2006). Although it is targeted to teachers who have ELLs in their classrooms, most all of us do these days, and I found much in the book that would help teachers at Title I schools as well.

Bill,

I was really pleased with the results of the above-mentioned self-assessment that I created for my ELLs. I helped me see that I needed to spend a lot more time explaining what it meant to “build upon an idea.” I also discovered that two students were not as confident about what they had read in the article and I needed to tweek my reading assessment that I had devised, because they were placed in a level that was a bit too high for them. These self-assessments provide very valuable data! The caveat, of course, is to utilize these as a part of the assessment portfolio, as Gottlieb (2006) suggested, because I have found that even the adults do not always tell the truth about what they do not know. This can be resolved in most cases, I believe, if you let students know this self-assessment is to see how well you have taught and to see if you can provide more information before any test or performance-based assessment.

Resources:

Donnelly, W. B., & Roe, C. J. (2010). Using sentence frames to develop academic vocabulary for English learners. Reading Teacher, 64(2),131–136. doi:10.1598/RT.64.2.5

Gottlieb, M. (2006). Assessment and the English language learner. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.