At the core of my teaching lay the concept of students self-grading. I made the switch about two years ago, and I have to say – “I like it!”
I first heard of the idea via a Canvas pamphlet, Canvas being a learning module many colleges employ. I was immediately open to the idea mostly to lighten my grading load. I started with just one course, a survey History class covering colonial and early America from 1607 to 1877. A couple of weeks in, I found that students grading themselves, and each other, held tremendous benefits. Most unexpected was the amount of student engagement: it spiked. Students asked more questions, followed and researched their own leads, both of which reflected better writing and communication skills.
"WonderCon 2005!" by _e.t is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Note, it did not happen right away. Students had to be taught how to conduct peer reviews of one another's’ written work. Beneficial to the individual student, however, was the viewing of different writing styles, perceptions, and attention others placed on the same materials they themselves covered. An average student, for example, may come across the work of a peer who went much deeper, researched more thoroughly, provided outside research, correctly cited, and wrote with fewer errors. Usually, not always, the exposure to another student’s writing became a prime motivator, a self-intrinsic push to seek out assistance in a wide array of skills: writing, analysis, inference, research, etc. Students sought out help from one on one consultations to NetTutor, librarians to visits to the writing center. In a matter of just a few weeks, students were already better writers and communicators.
Written work has been my main concern, true, and I am now ready to extend this self-assessment experiment to another level. Peer review worked well, for student to gain instant feedback on their papers. Part of the self-scoring involved telling me what they’ll work on next time around. Nine times out of ten, the student does improve on the very skill they wished to self-correct. I did not need to teach how to conjugate a verb into the past tense (History, remember?), or how to cite in the Chicago Manual of Style; students did this on their own.
And that’s the magic of self-assessment: students adjust, they become learners to their own needs. They know very well if they came up short. When I portray myself as a facilitator of their learning, I cease to be an authority figure with doom and gloom powers, but someone that can help them get to where they want to be – I am then, at that moment a Yoda in professorial clothing.
Top image: "Yoda nyaral" by János Szüdi is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0