Why Is Student Self-Assessment Important?

Now that so much assessment is situated in daily classroom life, there are numerous opportunities to engage students in the assessment process. They can compare their work over time, create evaluation criteria for a project, discuss their strategies for reading difficult texts, work with peers to evaluate and revise a piece of writing, and judge their reading preferences and habits by reviewing their reading journals. When students are collaborators in assessment, they develop the habit of self-reflection. They learn the qualities of good work, how to judge their work against these qualities, how to step back from their work to assess their own efforts and feelings of accomplishment, and how to set personal goals (Reif, 1990; Wolf, 1989). These are qualities of self-directed learners, not passive learners. As teachers model, guide, and provide practice in self-assessment, students learn that assessment is not something apart from learning or something done to them, but a collaboration between teachers and students, and an integral part of how they learn and improve.

Authentic Classroom Assessment in Action: Ms. Rodriguez's Classroom

Below are three "snapshots" of Ms. Rodriguez's fourth-grade class from the beginning, middle, and end of the school year. Following each is a synopsis of how she is using the principles of good authentic assessment.

September Ms. Rodriguez begins the school year with twenty-eight children. Seven are new to the school and to the community; twelve are second-language learners. She needs to gather some initial information about her students. During the first two weeks of school, she has conferences with the children who have portfolios from last year, reviewing their work and discussing reading and writing interests and goals with them. She also has brief conferences with the other children, finding out about their experiences and interests.

At the same time, she has all the children participate in a mini-theme, a beginning of the year warm-up unit. The students read, discuss, and write about an authentic piece of literature, Hurray for Ali Baba Bernstein by Johanna Hurwitz. Ms. Rodriguez engages the students in discussions about the story, characters, and plot, focusing on the clues and the inferences the characters made to solve the mystery. She explores various reading strategies with the students, discussing their strategies and watching them apply strategies as they read. They talk about which theme activities were interesting, easy, or difficult and why. Students also complete a short writing activity related to their reading. During this week-long theme, Ms. Rodriguez observes and notes the students' literacy abilities and work strategies. She also introduces portfolios to her class, drawing from what some students already know about portfolios; they discuss what portfolios are and why they are important. She explains that they will keep all their work from the mini-theme in a collection folder. Later, both she and they will select work from the collections to place in their portfolios.

Ms. Rodriguez uses her mini-theme instructional observations and student work, together with conference information, to determine any additional information she needs for particular children. She reviews the formal assessment materials that accompany her published language arts program and identifies those children who need an individualized informal reading inventory, those who might take a group placement test, and those who need no further special testing. Based on all these sources of information, Ms. Rodriguez develops a plan for her literacy program.

Comment: Ms. Rodriguez has implemented several assessment principles within the first two weeks of school. She has used a variety of types of information -- informal and formal, individual and group -- to help her get to know each child and to plan reading and writing instruction. She has immediately established a collaborative learning and evaluation environment by setting up a portfolio culture and valuing students' individual interests and goals. She has communicated clearly to students that she and the students will both contribute to the portfolio -- both are responsible for assessment. She has also reinforced the concept that assessment is an authentic, ongoing part of classroom life. The work that students do in class will be used to determine how well they are learning important outcomes. They understand too, that reflection on learning is a habit that is valued and nurtured in discussion, assessment, and goal-setting.

November At the beginning of November, Ms. Rodriguez prepares for parent conferences. The collections and portfolios have been well established. She has conducted several minilessons to help the students learn how to review their work, emphasizing personal response as well as work quality. Every two weeks students review their collections to make selections for their portfolios, then take the rest of the collection home. During the last selection time, Ms. Rodriguez asked all the children to place the following items in their portfolios: their reading logs, one of their character studies for the theme, and the planning form they used for the character-skit performance assessment completed at the end of the theme. Ms. Rodriguez has given all the students the end-of-theme test that came with her program, so she includes that in every student's portfolio as well. As part of the selection process, they discussed as a class what they learned about how authors used interesting beginnings in their stories and how students had practiced using interesting beginnings for their own stories. They also discussed what they had learned about dialogue and using complete sentences. Ms. Rodriguez asked the students to select two pieces of writing for their portfolios, one that was their personal favorite and one that demonstrated a good beginning and use of complete sentences or dialogue. She asked them to include all the rough drafts. She also encouraged them to choose one or two favorite completed activity pages for their portfolios.

Ms. Rodriguez has the students attend and lead a portion of the parent conference. To help the students prepare for the conference, Ms. Rodriguez guides the students in a review of their work, helping them focus on how they have changed as readers and writers and what personal goals they want to work on. She reminds them of how they have been learning to think about their work as they do their class assignments. She has the students spend time analyzing their portfolios. Then they role-play in pairs to explain their most important ideas succinctly. Students also show their parents a few pieces of their work. During the actual conference, the student leads the first ten minutes. Then Ms. Rodriguez joins the discussion, using her notes, checklists, and observations to add her professional insights. The last part of the conference includes only Ms. Rodriguez and the parents to be sure parents' questions and concerns have been addressed. Ms. Rodriguez uses both formal and informal assessment information that she has assembled to help parents understand their children's strengths and needs. Some of the work, such as theme tests and some activity pages, is graded; other work, such as reading logs, writing, response journals, and activities, is not. She encourages parents to look closely at the work and to share their own expectations and insights.

Comment: Ms. Rodriguez has prepared and enlisted her students as collaborators in assessment. The message is clear to both the students and the parents. She has taught students how to think about and evaluate their own work and requested that they take seriously their responsibility to set personal goals. She also has taken her role seriously by supplementing students' findings with her own documentation and professional judgment. In addition, the portfolio work is aligned with the instructional emphasis of the recent themes, reading and writing narratives. The work chosen to go in the portfolios is authentic evidence of progress toward this goal. Both process and products of learning are included. Finally, as she did in September, Ms. Rodriguez is relying on multiple, ongoing indicators of student performance.

June In June Ms. Rodriguez prepares for end-of-year assessment, portfolios, and report cards. All the fourth-grade students in the school district completed the state-wide standardized test in April, and those results have been recorded in the students' permanent records. She is particularly interested, however, in how the students have grown over time and what each student has learned this year. She will use both her formal and informal assessments as she completes end-of-year reports.

Ms. Rodriguez gives an end-of-year benchmark test that comes with her language arts program. She had given one in October and is eager to see her students' overall growth in reading and writing. She also reviews the theme tests and performance assessment the students have completed to gauge how well students are able to apply the skills and strategies they have learned in the themes. Informal assessments are also very important to Ms. Rodriguez. She reviews her students' portfolios, as well as her observation checklists, looking closely for specific changes over time. She is especially pleased, for example, about the growth of a second-language learner who could barely speak English in September, but now is reading short chapter books and writing and illustrating stories in English and in his native language. Another student, she notes, has shifted interests from reading and writing fantasy to nonfiction and biographies. A third has developed a strong voice and style in writing, but is still struggling with editing for mechanics.

Because Ms. Rodriguez views assessment as a shared responsibility, she has the students participate in end-of-year evaluation. After consulting with the fifth-grade teachers, she has decided to weed the portfolios, saving a limited number of pieces, and sending the rest home. Ms. Rodriguez identifies several pieces all students should keep in their portfolios. Then she helps the students systematically review their work. During this process, they discuss changes in their reading and writing over the year, using examples from their portfolios. Students individually select five pieces to keep in the portfolio and write letters to next year's teacher, telling a bit about themselves. Ms. Rodriguez holds a class celebration of students' accomplishments before the rest of the portfolio work is sent home.

Comment: Ms. Rodriguez has again used a combination of formal and informal assessments to evaluate students' progress. This combination guards against any one piece of evidence carrying too much importance and allows individual differences to be honored. Because Ms. Rodriguez and her students have systematically collected evidence of learning and used their portfolios throughout the year, they have concrete examples of growth and a way to talk about changes in their reading and writing.

The shared responsibility for assessment is confirmed by having both the teacher and student select work to send on to the next grade. The new teacher receives important information about the students' learning and also gains insight into what individual students value and what they judge to be good work. The celebration acknowledges pride in growth and learning, and it reaffirms the students' role in the assessment process.