Self-assessment. Discuss!

Whether or not you’re coming to our seminar ‘Self-assessment: stratgies and software to stimuate learning’ on 11th June, there are lots of things worthy of discussion.

Many of the speakers have provided links that you might like to look at:

Gwyneth Hughes on Ipsative Assessment

Tony Gardner-Medwin on Certainty-based Marking and CBM in Moodle

Peerwise (Paul Denny is in New Zealand so we will be showing a video) and a JISC-funded project that is evaluating the use of Peerwise at Edinburgh University.

Jon Rosewell on ‘Assessing with confidence’

And, from Phil Butcher et al at the Open University, ‘eAssessment at the Open University with open source software.’

Tony Gardner-Medwin and I have identified lots of questions related to self-assessment – click here for the full list. I particularly like the following:

• Must assessments always encourage ‘learning (and teaching) to the test’? Can self-assessment capitalise on the truism ‘assessment drives learning’ in a more constructive way?
• Should the learner or teacher be in charge of what self-assessments to do, and when?
• Is instant feedback important? (or is a delay better)
• Are explanations of answers important as feedback?
• Should students doing self-assessments be encouraged to work together?
• Should individual students’ marks on self-assessments  be ignored by teachers?
• Are self-assessments most useful after study (‘revision’) or as a stimulus to continuing study?

 There are lots of other questions about self-assessment (including many we haven’t identified) and I suppose the mother and father of all of them are ‘What do we mean by self-assessment?’ and ‘What does it matter?’ – hopefully we’ll have a good discussion on 11th June. However if you would like to discuss any of these questions (or anything else relating to self-assessment) now, whether or not you are able to join us on 11th June, please do so by using ‘comments’ on this post.