Tompkins, Ch. 4-2: Self-Assessment

As Tompkins aptly notes, it can be laborious and time-consuming for teachers to evaluate students’ wirings within a given instructional time. Self-assessment can be an effective alternative to traditional writing evaluation that can lessen teacher’s burden for assessing students’ writings by teaching them to use a process approach to their own writing. “In self-assessment, children assume responsibility for assessing their own writing …This ability to reflect on one’s own writing promotes organizational skills, self-reliance, independence, and creativity” (Tomkins, 2008, p. 84). Through the self-evaluation and self-reflection that occurs in self-assessment, students can increase their awareness of their own writing process and decisions and thereby develop into a better writer. In this way, self-assessment affords the students an active role in their own learning to be more independent and autonomous learner. Kenny & Hall (1986) asserts that self-assessment is an offshoot of the recent emphasis on the development of learner autonomy as a crucial force in education.

Response to Jaeun Kim

Jaen also mentioned self-assessment as an effective form of alternative testing, citing Curtz as saying that "Self-assessment encourages students to reflect on their learning and results in their consciously improving how they learn. As the students need to keep track of their own progress in their learning, they can be more aware and responsive to their own learning behaviors. Through self-reflections that occur after self-assessment, students will better learn how to learn. In this regard, this metacognivistic function of self-assessment can effectively guide the students throughout the writing process from planning, drafting, revising, to editing phase.

   

Sources

Kenny, B. and D. Hall (1986). Self-assessment as an alternative to testing. 
           Bangkok: CULI.

Tompkins, Gail E. (2008). Teaching writing: Balancing process and
           product. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.