Notes:

A lot of the research on assessment is about the role of the teacher as a source assessment and feedback information to students. It is normally teachers that mark students exams or who provide written and oral feedback on their assignments. However, in my own work I was more concerned with what students might be doing. Although teachers provide important feedback information I was concerned with how responsibility for assessment processes could be shared with students so as to help them to make their own judgements about learning.

In analysing this issue, it is clear that students already play a key role in their own learning and in assessment processes. There are two reasons for saying this. First, it can be argued that students are always monitoring and self-assessing their own work during the act of its production, at least at some level (e.g. when writing an essay even a poor student is not engaging in random acts). Only some students are better at self-regulation than others. Secondly, the act of using teacher feedback implies that self assessment is present. To use teacher feedback students must decode the message, internalise it and use that feedback to make judgements about their own work and then act on those judgements – but this already implies internal processes of comparison and self-assessment. Hence self-assessment is actually embedded in the use of teacher feedback. And if the use of feedback involves active self-assessment would it not be better if we strengthened this capability rather than only focus on improving teacher feedback.

So one question for me was: How can we scaffold students’ learning so that they become better at self-regulation?