Self-Assessment, Part II

Process

Learners need to keep in touch with how they are doing. The long-term goal is automatic, quality self-monitoring. Prompts and practice help build this skill while helping students track each project. Ongoing review of the research process has the result of demanding comprehension, comprehension, comprehension. Monitoring the relationship between steps as they are engaged in a project helps students understand the flow of the process. They can better see it as a process that they already have in their heads and use as they fix a bicycle or decide what movie to attend; that it is a generalizable information problem solver.

Students who do not periodically appraise their inquiry are likely to be left with 'first draft' types of results. They tend to miss resources, and gear unpolished products toward self or instructor rather than a more suitable audience. A simple "Where am I?" "What problems am I having?" and "What might I do differently next time?" constitutes a check on specific skills and general progress. This can be verbalized in a group, with a supervisor, or to one's self.

Self-monitoring provides a low-risk opportunity to change ideas and modify strategies, to fix mistakes without penalty, even being rewarded for improving an inquiry. Self-monitoring can strengthen a project, confirm and augment information, each time increasing ownership of that project.
A lagging project can gain new life through a mid-process self-assessment. Present-oriented students need support as they develop perseverance and commitment. They need the intrinsic rewards of having stayed the course to invigorate their efforts toward perseverance and commitment.

Students need to assess the relevancy of heir notes during their inquiry. They may decide they need to get back on track. If their notes reveal too much information, they may elect to refocus. Or they may need help in discarding unnecessary information, which is a very difficult skill and best assessed in mid-process. Exciting, new information not envisioned earlier may have a formative effect on a focus, or a revision of product or organization plans when inspected mid-process.

Most students need to become aware of what internalized strategies they are using during their inquiry. Activation of awareness is needed to help students listen to their inner selves. They need help in developing more strategies that will work for them, in effect giving themselves private lessons. This requires trying out different strategies, practicing, adapting, and appraising their application within the research process. Within the privacy of self-monitoring, students can test the power of new search paths, see a consistent pattern, and feel the security of replicability. The process is complete when students can employ these successfully without conscious effort. One aid in the development of additional strategies is to have skilled peer researchers explain how they decide what inquiry path to follow in a given situation.

If a class is having difficulty recognizing the stages of their thinking, a teacher or librarian may begin their own research on a parallel topic. Their personal strategies are then shared with the class, and the pump is primed by asking if anyone could use or has used that particular approach.

Student explanation, evaluation, or identification of strategies employed in an information skills project can be required as part of assessment. Strategies and how-tos can take the form of after-the-fact tips concluding a product or other research application. This presumes that the student(s) will assess the process and choose the best strategies to share.

"The point to grasp is how closely the growth of consciousness is related to the growth of the intellect."
Margaret Donaldson Children's Minds. 1978, 129

The ability to describe research strategies and thinking patterns is an analysis achievement and a confidence builder. It channels self-awareness and subsequently self-direction. Look at the key word tool in the STUDENT INITIATIVE chapter. What if students contributed to its development by dredging up their own best key word technique and verbalizing it? And were listed as the technique's contributor?

Use and Assessment of Strategies Found in Maine Samplers III & IV
III: Letters from Rifka (10); The Original Freddie Ackerman (8). IV: TOOL In Appendix B.:13th Clue (3); Bearstone (2); Grace (3) [includes TOOL]; Words of Stone (4,7) [TOOL in Appendix A]; Indian Winter (5).

Student Design of Information Assessment Tools

Students don't need to learn how to create standards and criteria and rubrics for every major task they face. That would be recreating the wheel. They do need to fully understand the assessment and evaluation of their educational endeavors, and how they will be appraised in their careers. Beyond understanding, they need to be able to judge the fairness of those appraisals. They also need to be able to evaluate their own self-directed, lifelong learning. When you have been behind the scenes and participated in the creation and use of assessment tools, you know how such tools are put together and hopefully how to respond to them to your benefit. You can understand them as a progression, and use the results of an evaluation to see the progression as a ladder and know the next rung you must climb. You can use the progression as you research to guide the components and the quality of your research. You will be able to choose a level to aspire to or settle for, or decide to seek help for a skill in order to achieve a higher level.

Quick Picks 1996, the annual ALA list for reluctant young adult readers, had significant input form 110 volunteer Rhode Island middle schoolers. These 'identified' reluctant readers developed a nominating assessment, and reviewed and voted over an eleven month period. Their four major criteria for what it would take to get them to pick up and read a book were: attractive cover art, catchy title, interesting blurb on the back of the book or flyleaf, and "something has to happen right away". Susan Rosenzweig, "Books That Hooked 'Em: Reluctant Readers Shine as Critics" in American Libraries, June/July 1996. P. 75. Incentives included sole access to new books and keeping books as long as they wished. A project of this type would make a good beginning for student development of assessment tools. It is fairly conventional and would be comfortable for students, librarian, and Language Arts teacher.

During the Child Labor Study at Lincoln Academy, this technique was used for ninth-graders to explore electronic surveying. In preparation for querying students around the world about child labor, they filled out downloaded surveys compiled by other students. Then groups analyzed the anatomy of these surveys. Pooling their reactions, they decided surveys should be evaluated as follows: purpose, appearance, demographics, directions, organization and sequence, response format, type of questions, wording of questions, and question content. With these as criteria to be assessed, students returned to the surveys for in-depth inspection.

This proved to be an enlightenment for the students. They began to understand the difference between questions of fact and questions of opinion, the problems and assets of yes/no answers and open-ended questions, when scales are overwhelming or clear, the delicate balance of privacy and the need for demographics, detecting subjectivity and hidden agendas, the significance of sequence and format. Their reaction charts were divided in half for the group recorder to enter what was (+) admirable or (-) poor or missing for each criterion. Groups reported to the class, entering their pluses and minuses onto a grand response format on the blackboard. From a discussion of these entries, the following rubric was developed.

Three sets of groups then designed an introduction, demographics section, and survey. Their written instructions reviewed their analyses and discussions, and were accompanied by a printout of their extended criteria and the availability of the surveys they had studied. Sets of groups critiqued and amalgamated each other's work and went back to the drawing board. A final composite of the efforts of three classes was created and sent on the Internet.

The class assessed not only their own survey after they analyzed the returned responses, but the criteria and rubric design. As they assessed their survey, they had a hard time choosing among the three levels of the rubric. They felt they always had to choose the middle, for the top was too perfect, and the bottom too low. They suggested a fourth level be added, to provide more realistic choices. An excellent solution. The teacher felt the students needed more background in child labor issues in order to craft more substantive questions. This had been an ongoing problem throughout the larger project, which had been piggybacked onto a traditional curriculum. The librarian began to see the potential of sharing and promoting the survey assessment instrument among the Academy's departments. Juniors in psychology classes were required to create and implement surveys, for example.

Student-designed Assessment Activities in Maine Samplers III & IV
This is a particularly easy kind of assessment to design into curriculum. III: Almost Famous (1,2,3); Bard of Avon (3); Morning (5,7,8); Original Freddie Ackerman (9,10. IV: Buried in Ice (3); Thunder Rolling in the Mountains (7); Grace (3,4); Gonna Sing my Head Off (1,6); Atlantic Salmon (5); The King's Equal (1,7,8) [includes TOOL].

First Steps for Plan-It-Yourself Assessment Tools

The best self-assessment occurs when the learner himself sets an appropriately challenging standard and creates criteria and rubrics that reveal a profile of compliance with the standard.

Ask students for their opinions before giving yours.

Small beginnings - small group criteria development for evaluating oral reports or preparation for interviews, or for an interesting literary analysis. Take the class or school rules and have the class set criteria for them. Students should then use the criteria and react to their applicability. Preceding individual criteria preparation with group preparation spreads skills and provides experience without apprehension.

For a more sophisticated creation see pages 61-62 in A Maine Sampler IV, in which students are asked to analyze and justify the concept of heroism in the novel Grace. They then compare Grace to Abbie Burgess, another lighthouse heroine. Their criteria is further applied to media treatment of heroic qualities, and a class list of modern day heroes. Note: this is an excellent example of practicing a skill repeatedly, and of application of information skills in varied and unusual contexts. See the definition of information literacy.

Have students (or groups) write simple how-tos in list form for concrete things, such as making breadboards or pop-up information visuals (sample how-tos may be found in the library's handicraft section as well as in magazines such as Highlights and World Explorer). Or create lists out of found how-tos in narrative form. Reduce the lists to several criteria - perhaps "design," "select wood," "measure," "cut wood," "finish" - leaving the finer points to cluster about each criteria. The cluster for "select wood" might be that the wood selected is a hardwood, seasoned, with no knotholes, and of a size to accommodate the design. Lo and behold, the students have created the standard rubric for that criterion!

An alternative, or next step in difficulty, is for students to develop how-tos for search formats, then from those evolve criteria.

Red fox researchers who had become "experts" in encyclopedia research put together a how-to chart which was posted in the classroom and/or library. The rest of the class was oriented to the chart, and asked to use it before deciding to ask help from an "expert." We did not have them develop those instructions into criteria from which to measure their own expertise. Next time.

The Break-a-Leg Checklist is already broken into 3 sections, the section labels clearly criteria. Try jumbling them up and presenting without the labels "written work," "visual," and "oral presentation." They could be cut into strips for groups to organize into logical sets and then label the resulting criteria. Compare and discuss the results. Or, use the checklist as is for students to amplify into a tool.

Have groups of students brainstorm "What makes a good Map?" or whatever. Groups share with other groups or class, then cluster the ideas to create criteria. The clusters will become the elements within the rubrics. For instance, one criteria for a map will be a legend. The elements might be about scale, icons, purposes and usefulness, for starters.

Students need experience in creating and using scales. Have students divide up the project into components, such as planning, key words, variety of sources, use of time, note-taking, drawing conclusions, product, feelings. A mini-ruler about an inch high is erected above each named component, with appraisal terms describing the scale's limits. Use of time could be bounded by worked hard at the top and wasted time at the bottom. Students might brainstorm other pairs of appraisal: superior/second-rate, extraordinary/inadequate, probing/trivial, yea!/boo! The self-assessment tool concluding the project could be the marked scales, with a paragraph written below the scales evaluating those measurements.

First Steps For Inexperienced Self-Assessors
Students need activities to get them thinking about themselves as learners. Prompt them with:

Don't forget that they will be informing you as well as themselves.

Researchers can test out an audience through self-appraisal. They read aloud one page of a presentation, listening to themselves as an audience. They can hear if it sounds rigid or over-structured or too rambling to be coherent. An added benefit: editing needs can be heard that might be overlooked in print.

When student judgment or opinions have not been seriously utilized, the role of self-appraisal will need to be carefully and respectfully developed. A good beginning for both students and eductors is to invite small groups to evaluate different parts of a class project, each with a provided set of criteria for that part. As each group presents its findings to the class, with their criteria before the class via an overhead projector, the critique can be annotated, then opened up to the class for further notation. (If the students are very young or very inexperienced, only one or two of the simpler parts of a project could be evaluated.) The results should include successful aspects, positive insights, and best 'whatever' (keyword, source, index, www site), as well as problem areas, dead-ends, and frustration. The educator then entertains suggestions to minimize frustration, eliminate problems, and emphasize positive components, and takes them under advisement following discussion. When the educator has had time to reflect upon these, the class should hear the accepted suggestions with valid reasonings. The instructor should be prepared to incorporate appropriate suggestions. Lip service has no place here.

First Step Toward Ownership

Instead of handing students a formal research booklet with self-assessment tools at the beginning of the year, select a sequence of concepts for emphasis while planning activities with a teacher. Provide students with helpful aids for each activity. At group exit conferences, have students evaluate these aids, especially those that were the most helpful and why and how. They can also suggest helpful modifications. They project which tools might be most generalizable, or most helpful to them as individuals. Each student then selects one (or two) of these tools to put into a developing self-help "Information Problem-Solver."

Self-Evaluation by Individual Students or Groups in Maine Samplers
III: TOOL ix; Almost Famous (3, includes TOOL); Children of the Dustbowl (1); Morning Girl (7) IV: TOOL in Appendix B; Atlantic Salmon (5); In Country (3b); Indian Winter (1,5); Roxaboxen (4, peer conferencing - 7); Sweetest Fig (2c)

October 1997
Maine Educational Media Associaton

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