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Thriving in Academe

Making Knowledge Useful

By assessing their own learning, students gain thinking skills, develop their own voices, and provide faculty a window for understanding what students learn.

As faculty working at an institution where student self-evaluation has long been used in its alternative adult education program, we at first never questioned its efficacy. Gradually, however, we became interested in understanding how and why student self-evaluation works. Through our questioning, we became involved in a collaborative working group, convened by the Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education, that focused on both the process and product of student self-evaluation.

With this collaborative group, made up of faculty from different institutions, we examined student self-evaluation. Where and how is it being used? What form does it take? Is it just a method for demonstrating and documenting student learning, or does it by itself create an additional learning opportunity? Is there a rationale for its use in current and compelling educational and developmental theories? What kinds of thinking skills does it cultivate? What information can it provide faculty? Could this information be useful in faculty development? In instructional improvement? In institutional outcomes assessment?

Defining student self-evaluation
Student self-evaluation, or self-assessment, refers both to a written product and to the thinking and writing process that takes place when students write. As products, self-evaluations contain tangible descriptions and analyses of students’ learning. As a process, self-assessment assignments ask students to reflect on, in writing, what they have learned. Self-evaluation tasks may be simple-—a one-minute, in-class writing assignment—or quite complex—an end-of-the-program summative evaluation. In more complex uses, we may ask students to evaluate the quality of their work or effort, think about its importance or usefulness, make connections with other courses, or describe problems encountered and questions raised.

Reflective thinking is key
Reflective thinking is central to student self-evaluation. In his book, Experience and Education, John Dewey describes reflective thinking as the necessary step that must come between impulse and action if intended purposes are to be achieved. As people who teach in higher education, most of us probably take reflective thinking for granted. It’s what we do. We think about things, wonder what they mean and signify. This kind of thinking may come naturally for some students, but not for others. For some, the capacity has been inhibited by any one of a number of different factors.

If we see our job as educators as helping people navigate the path toward responsible and mature ways of thinking, then we are helping students develop their reflective thinking abilities. We do this when we ask students to write papers, take essay tests, or in other ways think about what they are learning and what it means. Student self-evaluations provide another tool for fostering reflective thinking, but they also add an important dimension lacking in other types of exercises—self-reflection.

Learning as an active process
We believe self-reflection is the transformative agent of student self-evaluation. Not only are students asked to think about what they have learned, but they are also asked to think about it in relation to themselves and their own process of learning. By allowing students’ subjectivity into the educational arena, and by making it an expectation, we provide students with an opportunity to experience themselves as knowers, as people who have the right to claim a voice, an identity, an authority. Learning thus becomes an active, meaningful process and one that is about the learner as well as the content area studied. When we invite students to bring themselves into the educational arena, we make it richer for them and for us.

For students, it sends the message that what is happening to them is important and worth paying attention to. “Education isn’t just about storing a bunch of ‘stuff’ in your head,” we are telling them. “It’s also about shaping your values and beliefs, about integrating what you learn with who you are and are becoming.”

What faculty learn
Student self-evaluations also give faculty an opportunity to learn from students. Faculty can discover what has helped or hindered students’ learning, or they can learn what students actually learn, which might be different from what faculty thought they were teaching. Self-assessments are a form of conversation between student and teacher and provide the teacher with information about students’ development—about what students have learned and what they have learned to think about what they know.

Because self-evaluations provide information to faculty about the teaching-learning process, they also create an opportunity for faculty development and the potential for institutional learning. On a deep level they help us probe the heart of our discipline—how students learn and what we can do to enhance and deepen their learning.

Student self-evaluation and development
It is easy to focus on the ways student self-evaluation demonstrates student learning. But we believe that, more importantly, it helps foster student development in critical areas. We have identified four such trajectories of growth, which help us meet more intentionally the central aims of undergraduate education.

* Student self-evaluations cultivate an attitude of inquiry and foster self-directedness—We hope to foster in students the capacity for lifelong, independent learning and a curiosity about the world and themselves. Self-assessments ask students to create an active relationship with course material. Students may discover what they have learned, develop questions for further study, identify learning needs, and more actively direct their education.

* Self-evaluations integrate learning—We hope students will carry what they learn into their lives. The act of reflecting on one’s learning, looking back on it and describing it to another person, embeds it more deeply in memory.

* Self-evaluations deepen a sense of meaning and relevance—We want students to make sense of things, not just carry away a random collection of facts and information. When students explore the meaning of what they have learned, they often discover its relevance—how ideas apply to real life or explanations for their own experiences.

* Self-evaluations validate and cultivate the student’s voice and authority—We hope students will learn to think for themselves. Self-assessment provides a direct and immediate way for them to do just that. By providing an audience to students’ reflections, we give them explicit permission to speak authoritatively.

Creating an interactive, dynamic environment
The practice of student self-assessment carries the possibility of creating a dynamic, interactive environment on several levels: between student and teacher, learner and learning, learning and knowledge, and knowledge and action. Learning and education are active, not passive, processes. By their nature, student self-assessments help us keep education active and alive—for our students and for ourselves.

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