Self-assessment as academic community building: a study from a Japanese liberal arts university

Abstract

Student self-assessment has been heralded as a way of increasing student ownership of the learning process, enhancing metacognative awareness of their learning progress as well as promoting learner autonomy. In a university setting, where a major aim is to promote critical thinking and attentiveness to one's responsibility in an academic community, the temptation to implement self-assessment is undeniable. In the liberal arts university context, the activity seems to speak directly to the values and belief systems inherent to the liberal arts ideals, not the least of which is the preparation of young minds in the pursuit of recognizing and expanding their intellectual abilities, and then applying that knowledge to solving the world's problems for the betterment of humankind. As self-assessment on high-stakes testing is uncommon in East Asia, where the education system is still heavily teacher-centered and controlled (particularly in relation to grading and assessment), there is added interest and novelty in incorporating an assessment mechanism in which the students have a direct voice in their own grading. The purpose of this study was to to determine what value, if any, students placed in the practice as members of a university academic community. Following the general inductive approach to qualitative research, in which "the findings arise directly from the analysis of the raw data, not from a priori expectations or models" (AJE 27:237-246, 2006), student responses to openended questions related to their perception of the value of self-assessment were coded and analyzed. Qualitative findings indicate that students appear to find value in the exercise consistent with the overall aims of a liberal arts education, indicating that it makes them feel trusted by instructors, develops their sense of responsibility and forces them to look at their writing more objectively. These findings suggest that there is more value to self-assessment on high-stakes essay tests than simply achieving inter-rater reliability with expert teacher raters.

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