If the point of evaluating our students' work were only to rank them, or to give us a lever for encouraging their efforts, or even to describe the strengths and weaknesses of what they had produced, then it would seem clear that we should do it by ourselves. After all, we generally know more about the subject and how to deal with it than students do. We have seen lots of similar work, and can draw on wider experience to establish comparative standards. We hope we are more objective and less personally involved in the outcome than each student is.
However, the deepest reasons for asking students to formally assess their own work have little to do with that particular work. They have to do with our students' development over the long run. If we want to emphasize not just what each student did, but what each student learned, how his or her capacity for work in the future has been affected by this particular stretch of work, then the situation changes. For one thing, the student may well now know some things which are relevant to this new focus of assessment which we do not know, and have no way of learning unless the student says something about them. If they have learned how to write a paper without agonizing over the first paragraph for hours, or pay a new kind of attention to the clouds when they go for a walk, or think about the late Roman Republic when they read the papers, these changes may say more about their education in literature or physics or history than their essays or exams do, yet be invisible to us. To make it clear that they do matter, assessment should contain a space devoted to them.
Of course, we expect pleasure, enduring interest, and the ongoing illumination of experience by ideas to affect the quality of students' academic work as well. We would be dubious about claims of such gains which were not reflected in products in some way, sooner or later. And in fact, students need to practice self-assessment for the sake of the eventual quality of their objective work as well as to remind everyone involved of the importance of relatively subjective gains like those I just listed. The practice of self-assessment is a central way for students to acquire the reflective habits of mind which are essential to their ongoing capacities to do good work, and to progressively improve their work over time. Growth in intelligence, or thinking, is precisely growth in the capacity for ongoing reflective self-assessment. This point is the center of Dewey's analysis of the difference between mere activity and educational experience in Democracy and Education:
Change is meaningless transition unless it is consciously connected with the return wave of consequences which flow from it. .... Being burned is a mere physical change, like the burning of a stick of wood, if it is not perceived as a consequence of some other action. (p. 140)Thinking ... is the intentional endeavor to discover specific connections between something which we do and the consequences which result, so that the two become continuous. (p. 146)
Things would be simpler if students really were clear about what their work
was like, and the problems with self-assessment were simply that they lied
about what they had produced, or conversely, were insufficiently willing
to blow their own horns. Not so. Many students beginning college are simply
not in the habit of reflecting on their own work. In the program for freshmen
I taught this fall, we asked students to write short cover letters to accompany
the work they turned in to us. They wrote four or more short pieces a week
about their field observations and the readings for seminar discussion;
their first letter was supposed to select what were, in their judgement,
the two best entries in their accumulated work for five weeks, and to explain
their reasons for selecting those pieces as the best ones, in a couple
of sentences each. The striking thing about these first cover letters was
how many of the students didn't or couldn't do the second half of this assignment.
Very often, those who did say something about why they had picked the pieces
they did seemed incapable of separating their experience in producing the
work from some judgment about the results. They said things like, "I
picked this as my best reflections entry because I had a good time writing
it." (Readers who are interested in emotional and cognitive development
can no doubt produce various explanations for why the reflective distance
and decentering this assignment calls for should be difficult or incomprehensible
for many 19 year olds. Those of you who are more interested in the sociological
and political functions of the American high school will probably simply
note that most American students are never asked to judge their own work;
only to submit it to somebody else and to accept that authority's grade
as settling the question of how good it is.)
How can teachers support the development of students' capacities to assess their own work? First, through ongoing practice, beginning with small exercises like our cover letter, and progressing to more demanding ones. Second, through creating a context where alternative or even conflicting assessments are offered. In our program, students frequently participated in small group sessions in which the group looked at and discussed some sample of each student's work in turn; in the informal evaluation conferences at the end of each quarter, and the formal conference at the end of the program, there were always two assessments to be compared - one by the student and one by the faculty. In anticipating such a conference, one tends to wonder, "What will the other evaluation say about that?" That question leads to asking, "How would my work look to someone else, as something independent from me, on its own in the world?" Through experiences like these students gradually learn that there are variances in judgment, for which reasons can and should be given, that they themselves have to sort through those, and that their own view of their own work may be habitually inflated or severe.
The third important feature of teaching self-assessment, in my view, is mutuality. Everybody should judge, everybody should be judged. When a small group looked at its members' work, it looked at everybody's in turn; and at least some of the time it looked at the teacher's version of the assignment too. In evaluation conferences, students were not just asked to assess their own work and then subject that judgment to a superior review and critique. Evergreen faculty write self-evaluations of their own work each quarter; students write assessments of the faculty's work and of the program each quarter; faculty write evaluations of each other. This certainly is not a perfectly symmetrical process. Many faculty do not trade their self-evaluations with students at final conferences, though I think they should. In most conferences much more time goes to discussing the student's work than the faculty's. Nonetheless, in my view, the structure of this process is valuable even when nothing exciting emerges from a particular exchange. The fact that the faculty are engaged in a similar process is important, and often surprising, to the students. The opportunity to read the teacher's own view of the strengths and weaknesses of a program and of his or her own quarter's work makes the process of assessment a mutual one, and locates the teacher as a finite figure, engaged in furthering his own education. At the center of this process, for both teacher and student, both in understanding the subject matter and in improving the process of teaching and learning it, is thinking in Dewey's sense - the growth of the capacity for the self-reflective assessment of one's activity.
Thad Curtz, Ph.D.
LAB II, Room 2374
The Evergreen State College
Olympia, WA 98505
This article is copyrighted by the author, but may be freely reproduced in whole or in part in any medium, provided that the author, his institution, and the original publication are cited. (I'd also appreciate a copy of the reprint.) In a nearly identical form, it first appeared in the Washington Center News,a quarterly publication of The Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education (Fall 1991, Volume 6, Number 1, pp. 23-25).