Student self-assessment
Product evaluation for struggling writers

Student self-assessment is an integral part of student writing. When you aren't around to supervise, students must be capable of monitoring their own work.

Writing students have three areas in which they must learn to assess their own performance.

1) Writing products, discussed below.

2) Writing process.

3) Problems that may affect writing.

Although the three areas overlap to a maddening degree, we'll break them apart to make discussion easier.

Assess products at end of each stage

For a struggling student, self-assessment needs to occur at the end of each stage of the writing process.

Specifically, students need to monitor their progress when they complete each of these intermediate writing objectives:

• Their working theses.

• Their writing skeletons™.

• Their comprehensive plans.

• Their speed-drafted compositions.

• Their revision.

• Each edit of their manuscripts.

• Before they submit their finished documents.

The student self-assessment process for each of these writing products is a matter of comparing their work to an example or a description of what they were to produce.

Examples must be well-taught first

Don't rely on a writing rubric to provide adequate description of what a good written product for each step of the writing process looks like. You need to provide examples for some students and explanation for all students.

Moreover, if you are going to give students examples of correct or competent work, you must teach students what elements of the sample you look at in determining whether it is correct or competent writing. Then you need to help students build those criteria into their self-assessment scripts.

Sample self-assessment script

For struggling writers, yes/no questions make student self-assessment possible, providing the assessment questions have just one element for students to consider.

If the working thesis is described as a single declarative sentence that makes an assertion about the writing prompt topic, for example, the student self-assessment could this series of yes/no questions:

• Is what I wrote a single sentence?

• Is what I wrote a declarative sentence?

• Is the sentence about the writing prompt topic?
  

• Does the sentence I wrote make an assertion about the writing prompt topic?

Don't expect struggling writers to respond to a question that requires assessing more than one element at a time. The narrow focus provides the struggling writer with security and positive feedback.

Concentrate on getting students be able to answer "yes" to every self-assessment question, even if their writing is lackluster.

First completion, then quality

You cannot teach writing elements well without showing students how those elements work together within pieces of writing. For example, it is worthless to teach students they must write opening sentences that hook their readers without teaching them how the hook pulls readers toward the thesis.

If you don't teach writing terms in the context of whole pieces of writing, students will not be able to produce whole pieces of writing.

Struggling students need to go through the writing process to learn the writing process before you or they think about the quality of their writing.

Even struggling writers get more interesting and more fluent with practice. Trust me on this.

Some of your students will catch on faster and move on to producing higher quality writing. They can continue using the same student self-assessment technique as the struggling students, but substituting more advanced procedures for the basic ones.

Leave checklist prep to students

You could prepare student self-assessment tools for every stage of the writing process and give them to your students.

However, it is much better to help students learn to turn directions into tools for self-monitoring. When students go into the workforce, their supervisors may not give them checklists. Students who know how to create their own checklists will be able monitor their performance on the job as well as at school.

A word about gifted writers

Students who have writing facility can profit from the same student self-assessment strategies as their struggling peers. However, because of their innate ability, they don't need to make the monitoring as obvious and as mechanical as struggling writers do.

A talented writer may pull out self-assessment routines only when the assignment deals with unfamiliar material. That's OK. Don't force your good writers to go through activities if they don't need them: that's a waste of their time and yours.

Another area in which struggling students need to learn self-monitoring strategies is the writing process itself.