Literature Review: A Case for the Value of Self-Assessment

A Culture Shift: Teachers relinquish power in order to empower learners

According to Stasio et al., self-assessment is an essential 21st century skill because we live in a world where the kind and scope of knowledge needed in professions is constantly changing. The ability to self-assess and apply feedback to improvement and new learning is crucial.

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Educators need to “[t]each students to evaluate themselves and their colleagues... [A]ctive involvement of students in the evaluation process seems to correspond to an equally active role in the management of learning processes…”

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Self-assessment shifts the “locus of control” to students in the learning process. This “AUTONOMOUS CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING… IS A KEY COMPETENCE FOR LIFELONG LEARNING.”

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Self-assessment also builds motivation, fosters resourcefulness, and leads to a growth mindset.

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By changing how we assess, we can change the culture around learning, making it more sustainable in educating for a rapidly changing world (116).

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Stasio et al. argues that what is needed in higher education is “a cultural change in the way teachers’ and students’ roles are socially conceived” (116). Teachers have to give up some power in order to empower students.

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Transferable Knowledge: Assessments as real vs. simulated knowledge application

A major purpose of assessment is to determine if knowledge in the classroom will be effectively transferred to the “real world.” That’s what “competence” should indicate. The problem Tummons addresses in his article is whether how students perform in a simulated setting (whether it be on a medical dummy or in a “mock” classroom) is an indicator of how well they will perform in their profession.

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Tummons proposes that we make a “category mistake” when we mistake “actual things in the world… with the ways in which we write or talk about them…” (48).

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Basically, Tummons is questioning whether the types of reflections required in a teacher education program actually produces teachers who are reflective practitioners.

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“We lose sight of the differences between doing reflective practice assignments and being reflective practitioners” (Tummons, 2019, p. 50)

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It seems to me that self-assessment may be a way of teaching this skill to our students. If students are truly engaged in self and peer assessment, it’s a real task, not just a simulation. They can practice assessing their work and modifying their performance based on feedback.

Paradigm Shift: The value of education measured by what students can do in the world

One benefit of self-assessment is that it is “designed to enable students to participate with an eye on their learning, not the grade” (Bourke, 2017, Abstract)

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In higher education, Learning Outcomes are typically viewed by stakeholders as a method to measure the “value added” by a college education, and “to a large extent the quality and effectiveness of colleges and universities” (p. 827).

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Self-assessment is part of a shift in educational theory AWAY from knowledge transmission models and toward focusing on “what students can do in the world” (p. 828).

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It should be unnecessary to state this explicitly, but in order for education to serve any purpose, students need to learn how to transfer their knowledge from the classroom to the real world.

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As a corollary to this, students need to learn how to be professionals in their field, not just master content specific to their profession.

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According to Bourke, [tests create] “an unnatural divide between assessment tasks and learning, [resulting in students] taking less responsibility for their own assessment” because they’ve had to rely on [teacher assessments] to tell them if and how much they have learned.

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Self-assessment requires the teacher to relinquish some power.

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It also requires students to assume some responsibility in their empowered status as “partners” in their own learning (p. 829).

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A Radical Suggestion:

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Bourke’s article floats the idea of deciding on criteria for evaluation after the assignment is done rather than before. Instead of putting all their energy into meeting highly specific grading criteria, (p. 833):

• Students create a project

• Students co-create a “rubric” for what an excellent project would consist of

• Students evaluate how well they met that “bar” of excellence

• Teachers provide feedback on both the project and the self-evaluation

• Student works toward an excellent final product, not toward a grade

Bourke quotes Tan, noting “that ability to self-assess is the springboard for your lifelong learning” (p. 831). In other words, “students should learn professional skills, learn to deal with feedback from others, and develop their own assessment skills that help them to recognize their learning needs and eventually to improve their performance” (Fastre et al., 2013, p. 612 quoted by Bourke, p. 832).

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Future Driven Self-Assessment Tasks (p. 832) must do the following:

• make explicit links between students’ learning and their emerging identity and professional practice

• value ontological knowledge (how to be) not just epistemological knowledge

• draw students’ attention back to earlier work so they can apply feedback (p. 833).

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In Conclusion,

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Bourke argues that “a radical shift from learning outcomes to learning needs to be explored” (p. 834). Also, “by introducing self-assessment as a way to incite learning, we are changing the way we understand assessment” (p. 836). Finally, self-assessment contributes to future focused learning, preparing students for “lifelong and informal learning within their professional context” (p. 838).

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Formative Assessment Trumps Summative: Calling educators out to apply what we know

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O’Keefe et al. address the need for a paradigm shift in education models from content acquisition to meaning construction. Making a deliberate shift to Formative Assessment (in contrast to Summative Assessment) goes with this model.

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Even though it’s widely known that formative assessment is beneficial to both students and teachers, it is not as widely used as it should be.

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Teacher mindset is an obstacle. Teachers tend to cling to models where the structure and progression of the subject discipline is dominant rather than student development (45).

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Definitions need to be clarified.

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Formative Assessment - used to refer to benchmarks; students get tested on module 1 before being allowed to move on to module 2. This is really just Summative Assessment practiced in increments.

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Formative Assessment should be understood to refer to integrating assessment and feedback into every stage of the learning process. Formative Assessment is a process, not an instrument. The process provides qualitative insight into student understanding along the way. Teachers should adapt their lesson plans to what they discover through formative assessment. Sometimes there is a distinction between “informal” formative assessment (like just described) and “formal formative assessment” which is more like the benchmark model.

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