Self-assessment can sometimes be seen as a nice extra, like, do this exciting thing if you've got a little bit of extra time. It might make you more self-regulated and more independent! But in truth, these forms of assessment are really helpful for students to understand what improvement in their learning looks like. Most students don't understand a rubric just by being shown it. They might scan the words as their teacher talks about it, but to really understand it, they need to use it by assessing their own or someone else's work. Then they look for the evidence and compare what they're looking at with the wording in the criteria. It's only then that they'll also have the realisation of how much better some rubrics are than others.

An important thing about self and peer assessment is that we need learners to start being able to make the judgments themselves. Not only is it extremely inefficient for teachers to be having to make all of the judgments, so every single piece of assessment has to be seen by the teacher, that's a huge bottleneck. Bear in mind that students won't be good at doing this to start with, just like we teachers weren't either. To start with, they'll probably be either way too harsh or way too nice because they know what the judgment of being assessed feels like. That's one of the reasons why they're too nice. They don't want to be mean to their friends. But once you start getting them to hone in on the evidence and compare it to the criteria, that's when learning is enhanced.

So make sure that you teach them how to self-assess by marking one and saying out loud what you're thinking as you do it. There's always a really interesting conversation to be had after a self-assessment and a teacher assessment have been done and there's some disagreement. Rather than asking who's right, what we need to think about is where the evidence is in the work.

It's a great idea to build some self-assessment and peer assessment into your processes. You could put this before the student submits the work to improve the final product, or after the teacher has marked it and then compare what the students and peers said compared to what the teacher said.

More self-assessment makes students less reliant on teachers. They can make the judgments themselves, and then, if they've got a good assessment framework, they can see what their next step in learning is. Doing stuff like this creates self-regulated and potentially lifelong learners.

[Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash]