Student self-assessment query:
Do you know and use the strategy?

It is often necessary to force a student to do a self-assessment in order to discover:

The remedy for not knowing content is different than the remedy for not following procedures. You will waste your time and your student's time if you prescribe for the wrong problem.

Context for self-monitoring

Give your entire class strategies that work most of the time for most people. For example, teach students how to use a thesis maker to create a working thesis. That's a strategy that works for almost every nonfiction writing situation for almost every student.

Struggling students may do an activity, but struggling students won't check to see that they did it correctly. When problems crop up, as they certainly will, deal with the problems by helping the student do a self-assessment.

Struggling students often know why they had a problem but don't trust their own assessment of a situation. Your task is to help them identify problems so they can address them.

Check student's strategy knowledge

The first time or two you'll have to prompt use of the student self-assessment procedure. We'll use Caitlin as an example.

Begin by checking Caitlin's working thesis. If she messed up, you need to get Caitlin to identify why she had difficulty.

Say something like, "It looks as if you had some difficulty making this thesis builder work. Let's see if we can figure out how to make it work for you. What was the very first thing you did?"

Try to get Caitlin to explain what she did and the order in which she did the tasks.

Ask Caitlin to explain why she did that particular thing. You may want to have her show you where she put information or the step in a set of directions she was following. Sometimes a student has simply misheard or misread something.

Listen for explanations that don't make sense if the student understand the terms correctly. Inability to get things in the correct place or correct sequence if students correctly understand the terms could indicate a true learning disability.

Check student's learning procedures

If Caitlin's understanding of the strategy seems sound, check to see if she has some bigger problems. From observing a student, you probably have an inkling of likely problem areas. You might ask questions like these:

• Did you allow enough time to use the thesis builder?

• Did you spend too much time trying to make one assertion sound good?

• Did get busy thinking about something else and forget about building thesis statement?

• Do you think you made enough trial thesis statements to come up with a good one?

• Did you get frustrated or angry with yourself when you couldn't get a good thesis right away?

Such questions reveal problem areas that are not restricted to writing, such as time management, inattention, and a low frustration tolerance level.

If Caitlin indicates something might have been a problem, follow up with questions to get her to find one or two possible ways to prevent the problem in the future. It's unlikely that you'll solve Caitlin's problem this way, but it is at least a starting place.

If you see a couple students have the same general learning problems (difficulty handling frustration, for example, or procrastination), you should build some positive self talk for dealing with those issues into scripts you model in response to writing problems.

You are probably thinking that this sounds more like a student-teacher conference than student self- assessment. You are right.

Struggling writers struggle because they do not know how to identify and deal with their main problem.

That is why they need your help before they can move into the student self-assessment mode.

In my experience, most students in the regular school population can move to self-monitoring after you've helped them with one or two basic problems that hamper them as writers. You may have a month or even two when feel as if the wicked witch transformed you into a special ed teacher, but if you can hang on, I think you will find students resolve their issues and you'll be back to normal duty again.

Assessment of the quality of their writing product is a less difficult process for students.