Self-assessment: effective tips to help teach students to critically evaluate their achievements

Weaknesses, identify needs, learn responsibility and strive for self-improvement. Self-assessment: Effective tips to help teach students. 

Self-assessment: effective tips to help teach students to critically evaluate their achievements
Self-assessment: effective tips to help teach students to critically evaluate their achievements

How this method of assessing knowledge works, and how to teach students to objectively assess their progress. Student self-esteem in the modern school is an integral part of learning, as it provides students with the opportunity to identify their strengths and weaknesses, identify needs, learn responsibility and strive for self-improvement. Self-assessment: effective tips to help teach students.

If you do not yet use the method of self-assessment and do not know how to teach students to objectively assess their success, remember a simple and useful algorithm:

  • Explain to students why you need to have self-assessment skills.
  • Positively adjust students to the need to constantly analyze their own learning outcomes.
  • Develop clear and understandable assessment criteria with students. Design them, place them in a prominent place in the classroom. And try to work according to a certain algorithm for a while.
  • When the previous stages have been successfully implemented, explain to the students in practice that the assessment criteria may change depending on the task and pedagogical goals

Practically implementation

Practical implementation: students independently correlate their own results with the developed evaluation criteria and analyze their own results.

  • At the last stage, formulate conclusions, plan further actions. Set goals to improve students' knowledge, skills, and abilities. In this way, you will teach children to think critically, analyze and predict their own success.

This stage has the greatest value because in the process of analyzing their own success. The child has the opportunity to see personal development and success, to realize the effectiveness of their activities, and so on.

Defining certain assessment criteria will tell children what knowledge they need to master, and problematic questions from the teacher will help shape the trajectory of learning activities.

Examples of problematic questions:

  • What knowledge do I have now?
  • In which direction am I moving?
  • What is the immediate goal you plan to achieve?
  • What needs to be done to achieve the ultimate goal?

It is difficult for a child to analyze his own results. So it is worth asking questions that will help. The student to evaluate their achievements as objectively as possible:

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  • Is this a fair assessment of the work done?
  • Which task was not difficult to assess?
  • And what was difficult to assess?
  • What results do you think you will get next time for this task?

Effective forms of self-assessment:

Forms, magazines, self-assessment questionnaires for students

At the end of each task or after the lesson, ask students to take a few minutes to complete the knowledge analysis form of their choice.

The form can approximately have the following list of tasks:

  • Write down some interesting facts that you learned while studying the section.
  • What terms and concepts do you remember?
  • Which terms and concepts can you easily explain?
  • Are there any concepts you remember that you can't define yet?
  • Name one or two things on the school topic that you would like to know more about.
  • What caused problems with mastering this section?
  • Are there ways that can help you better master the topic?

Express cards for self-assessment

To help each student evaluate their progress as objectively as possible. Print express cards and use them as needed, such as after learning new material.

If you still find it difficult to assess students' knowledge. Their answers will be an appropriate clue when planning the next lesson outline.

  • What important things did you learn?
  • Which concept is unclear?
  • What seemed uninteresting?
  •  Can you tell your parents?
  • Do you need further explanation?

Self-assessment scale

This scale can be horizontal or vertical. The main thing is that students understand the principle of interaction. The simplest design option is to use the following phrases:

  • "I still have to work - I train - I succeed";
  • Like a scale in a certificate of achievement: "has significant success - demonstrates significant progress - achieves results with the help of adults - needs attention and help."

Evaluation chart with Lego bricks

This is an option where the child evaluates the appropriate performance of their work with the help of bricks, built in the form of a diagram. One brick - low efficiency, more bricks - respectively, the level of acquired knowledge became higher. According to this scheme, you can analyze your progress during one lesson. Or the whole school day. Colors to indicate the level of academic success students choose independently.

Exercise "Picture of my success"

Invite students to complete the steps of acquiring certain knowledge in the form of a drawing, comic, or fairy tale. The work will take a few minutes. But the result of such an exercise will help you learn. What is the most difficult or incomprehensible for students? And what you need to pay attention to again.

Starry Sky Method

To work, it is necessary to prepare a paper model of the starry sky and paper stars of larger size (tasks for the current topic, which are attached by the teacher at the end of the lesson) and smaller (aspects of students' learning activities). Students glue their stars as close / far as possible to the big star - according to the understanding of the received information. In this way, the teacher will be able to analyze the depth of awareness of students on a particular topic.

Target method

This method helps students compare their own assessment of their activities with the teacher's assessment. First, children draw a target in notebooks. Three parts of the target are filled in by the student (in each part a separate aspect of educational activity in the lesson is recorded). In the fourth part, the teacher records his impression.

At the end of the lesson, the children write down the results of their work in the relevant parts of the target. And the teacher fills in their sector. This method will positively affect the perception of both successes and failures. And will help students focus on their strengths. Rather than comparing themselves with other participants in the educational process.