Week 5 Jourmal

Assess your own work based on the rubric and feedback from your colleagues. Add this to your online reading journal entry for this week.

• Why was your performance at the level that it was?

I believe I scored well because of my meaningful application of self assessment in the classroom. I started to use self assessment more this year and was able to provide three conconcrete examples of what self assessment might look like in the classroom. I was shouted out by each of my peers for this application as it not only outlined my understanding of self assessment but also showcased creative applications. The response can be found below. 

What might effective self-assessment look like in your discipline?

In Science, I use three types of self-assessment and each is effective in its own way. First is self assessment within project groups. Students are given a rubric for each project which clearly states the targets for the project along with a scale from below expectations to exceeding expectations so students understand the requirements for exemplary work. This assessment also extends to contributions to the project as students assess themselves and their group members. I can then find disconnects in student's perceived contributions and those noted by others to give specific feedback to students. 

Second is self-assessment in regards to revising exit tickets and other classwork. If 50% or more of the class does not understand the content of the exit ticket, I would take class time to break down the questions, address misconceptions, and elicit student thought in regards to the exit ticket. In this case, I don't provide specific feedback to each student and just walk through the problems with the students. Once we've walked through the problems. students can go back to their work and assess whether they've broken down the problem properly or understood the content properly. Because student's were not given grades or feedback, each student would have to evaluate their own work and revise based on their new understandings of the content. Fowler et al. (2019) 

Lastly, I use self-assessment for exams. For example, I had a Performance Open Response Quiz that asked students three questions that targeted different skills or levels on content knowledge. Skills included modeling, argumentation, and analyzing data. At the end of the quiz, there was a posted rubric of what each response must include at a high level. The rubric included no content information but informed students that Bohr models must be accurate, labeled, and include a description. This allows students to access what aspects of the rubric they have included and then move towards meeting all expectations based on the guidelines. Students can think about what aspects they are missing and will remember to include these in responses going forward. 

 

• What, if anything, could have been done to strengthen your grade?

For this assignment, I dropped the ball in regards to my grammar. I usually use a site called scribens to check my grammar and reorganize my sentences. I lost points from my peers due to this mistake in not checking my grammar. 

Lastly, reflect on the following questions:

• How much do you feel like you learned from assessing OTHERS work?

I learned about how to better use quotations and sources to support my ideas from assessing other people's work. For example, Jared Fenda included the following sentence in his work. Self-assessment gives them this ownership by promoting "academic self-regulation" (Andrade 2009, 13). By using a source and a quote, Jared was able to be more specific on the benefits on self regulation. 

• How much did you feel you learned from assessing your OWN work?

By assessing my own work, I was able to find my mistakes and create a plan to improve in the future. Going forward, I would make sure to run my discussion posts through a grammar checker in order to properly convey my ideas.

• How might this peer and self assessment experience be used to improve learning in your classroom context?

Based on the assessment provided, I can improve learning in my classroom by having students conduct the same process we conducted in the discussion posts. For a project this year, I can have a group of students give a presentation and have all other groups score them on a rubric and provide feedback. I could then average the scores and share the feedback with the students. I think students are each other's biggest critiques but also they notice things that a teacher may gloss over. 

• What implications does this assignment have for creating and improving rubrics for learning?

The implications from this assignment would be the application of more creative self assessment in the classroom. Continuing on my idea above, I would have to provide a clear and concise rubric for students to judge off of. There should be a level of work in each category (exceeding expectations to below expectations) to remove any ambiguity in students assessment of other's work.