Student Self-Reflections
In my quest for making assessment more meaningful to my students, I decided that I needed to investigate how they assess themselves in their writing. If I wanted to create a culture in my classroom that assessment is not something that is done “to” them, then I decided I better get a peek into how they view their own writing.
To do this, I simply posted a google classroom question to each of my classes after they submitted their most recent writing project: “How do you know you have gotten better in your story writing this unit?” When 75 student responses came flooding in, I have to admit, I avoided looking for a few days because a little voice in my head kept whispering, now what?
When I got up the courage to look at them, I read them all. While their comments were important, what was glaring to me was the skill set of self-reflection that either was present or not. I decided to categorize these skills into 4 groups, so I could synthesize all of the information. The skills were: identifies growth, identifies growth in a specific area, identifies evidence of growth, and identifies a specific tool/support that helped them grow. I gave each student response a point for each categorized skill that they achieved with the hope they could meet criteria across all the categories. The majority of my students' responses earned 1–2 points in the 4 possible skill categories.
The students will never see these scores. I am using them just for me. Going forward, I plan to build in more time into my writing class to support these skills on self-reflection and self-assessment. Maybe looking at the whole piece all at once is too much? I could have my students assess their writing in smaller parts. They might need a visual tool to help scaffold these skills. I can provide that. I realize now that my students significantly lack the skills to see growth in themselves, while I, in contrast, find it easy to see. With each writing piece of theirs that I grade, I become more aware of their writing skills than they are, and that must be changed. Unless that changes, my assessments will continue to be just another piece of paper that concludes a writing unit. I do not want that to happen. My fear of “now what” is gone and I’m filled with excitement because now I have better ideas of how I can support them, and I no longer feel lost in my quest in writing assessment.
Self Reflection Quotes from Students
“i don’t know i did not do my best in this story”
“because my story has gotten longer and i put more thought into it”
“I know I have gotten better as a writer because I have started to make goals for myself in my mind outside of the goals we are supposed to set in class. I also have started to use my checklist a lot more to help me make my best draft of any of the writing I am supposed to be completing in class and making checklists for myself on sticky notes or just in my head.”
“I have more details in my writing and I did more paragraphs”
“Because I have better paragraphs and details in the paragraphs. I also spelled more thing correctly.”
