In their chapter “Thinking Through Assessment,” Brenner, Pearson, and Reif offer many valuable suggestions for creating meaningful assessments- for students, teachers, parents, policy makers, taxpayers, everybody! The authors suggest that when students are being assessed, they are looking to answer the questions “How am I doing?” and “What shall I do next?”

One of their suggestions for making assessments useful for students is to include self-evaluations. When I read this, I was instantly reminded of my experience with self-evaluations in high school. My senior year, I took a philosophy class that assigned a short paper every week. Along with the paper, we were required to fill out self-evaluation forms. They were printed on bright yellow paper, and always contained the same list of questions, things like- “Rate your paper on a scale of 1 to 5 in terms of clarity, argument, etc.” There weren’t any short answers or free responses. I can’t really remember the specific questions too well, but I do remember that I HATED filling them out. At the end of the form we had to write what we thought our grade should be, and then when we got the paper back, our teacher wrote what he thought the grade should be, and also corrected our ratings from 1 to 5 in terms of clarity, etc.

I think I had a pretty negative association with self-evaluation, the way I experienced it was never fulfilling for me. So when I saw Linda Reif’s example of a self-evaluation form for a paper I was very excited! She calls the self-evaluation “Process Paper (Background History of the Writing) and Evaluation”(p.269). I loved the questions she included- they really encouraged reflection on the writing process.  I especially liked the question, “What do you want me to know about the writing of this that I might now know just from reading it?” I think this question really opens up a door for student-teacher communication about writing. The question “How did you come up with the idea for this piece?” also invites students to share their thought process with the teacher.

I think this template is an awesome example of how to make self-evaluation meaningful and useful for students. I definitely want to use it with students in the future!