The term self-assessment likely conjures up different images for different people. Some people might think of doing a self-help quiz in Cosmo, while others picture a student checking their spelling test, and still others imagine a student using a checklist to evaluate their work before turning it in. Self-assessment is more than just a way to save a teacher from having to check a quiz, and it’s more than a checklist to make sure all parts of an assignment are complete before handing it in. Effective self-assessment by the student also provides the teacher with evidence about student perceptions of their learning. The teacher and student can then use all of this information to set the criteria for success and to create a clear outline of the path to success. So what goes into effective self-assessment besides a well done checklist or rubric? Arthur Costa, Ed.D and Bena Kallick, Ph. D have described 16 habits of mind. A "Habit of Mind is an effective behavior used while solving problems for which there are no immediate answers. Three of these habits of mind are directly tied to self-assessment: thinking about our thinking , persistence and being open to continuous learning.Thinking about our thinking, or metacognition is the ability to be conscious of our thinking in a given situation and then to evaluate the productiveness of our own thinking skills and strategies. By assessing what they know and don’t know, students identify their own baseline so that they can then identify ways to improve their work. Not only is this self-assessment helpful for making future improvements, it also allows students to make mid-course corrections if something is not going as planned. This will be a new skill for many students, and they will need to practice before it becomes second nature. You can help students develop this skill by asking them to rate their level of confidence in a decision or how they selected certain strategies and how those strategies worked for them. This is also a great time to ask students about their perceived level of effort to help them see the connection between level of effort, selected strategies and the outcome.

Additionally, students’ perceived level of effort can help the teacher determine whether a task needs to be adjusted to be more or less challenging. Being able to think metacognitively is a strategy in itself that allows students to continuously learn even in the absence of a teacher.A good partner behavior to metacognition is persistence. Persistence enables a student to analyze a problem and develop strategies to attack the problem. It’s a bit of a catch 22, however, because to be persistent you need a set of strategies and alternate strategies, but to develop a set of strategies, you need to be persistent. When persistent, a student assesses whether the selected strategy is working throughout an activity. If it isn’t, they choose a different one and try again. When students have no alternative strategies, they sometimes may show frustration, which you are witnessing when they crumple their papers and throw them away saying, "I can't do this," "It's too hard," or, when they write down any answer to get the task over with as quickly as possible. Teaching students a variety of problem solving strategies and encouraging them to use metacognition to evaluate the use of those strategies will help to increase persistence which will further increase the value of self-feedback.The final habit that we’ll discuss as being directly related to self-assessment is Remaining Open to Continuous Learning. It is only if students are open to continuous learning that receiving feedback from any source is considered valuable. As long as a student is open to learning, then the confidence gained from metacognition and persistence, in combination with their curiosity, will allow them to constantly search for new and better ways. People with this Habit of Mind are always striving for improvement, always growing, always learning, always modifying and improving themselves.

After all, isn’t the goal that students learn how to learn so they become lifelong learners? They’re not always going to be in a classroom and need to be able to learn more on their own for personal and career growth!There are many tools and strategies that you can use as a teacher and that you can teach students to use for self-assessment. A simple strategy that can be used in the earliest grades up through high school is thumbs up / thumbs down when asking students their level of confidence in an answer or decision. Students can display a red, yellow or green card to indicate their level of understanding. Students can also use cards that are labeled as "still thinking" and "ready to move on."These visual displays of a student’s self-assessment is a quick way for a teacher to see whether to move on in the lesson or not. Reflection journaling is another technique that provides students the opportunity for self-reflection and illustrating their thinking pathways. Through the use of a portfolio, whether a low-tech version or a higher tech version using an application such as Seesaw, allows students to see their thinking progression throughout a project, over a series or units or even over the course of a year.Whether you go low tech or high tech, make sure to explicitly teach students how to effectively perform and use the results of self-assessments. If you can also help them to improve metacognition, increase persistence and remain open to continuous learning, you’ll not only see the benefits in your classroom but you’ll give the students skills that will help them for the rest of their lives!.