The Effect of Self-Assessment on Achievement in Writing in English

Abstract

The "learning autonomy," which is believed to have positive effects on learning processes, is achieved when learners have the responsibility to make decisions in their own learning process. In order for individuals to have learner autonomy, the individual must be able to decide which methods and techniques to use in the learning process, to follow their own learning process, and to arrive at realistic assessments for their own learning situation. In the literature, the evaluation of one's own learning process and products is called "self-assessment." Self-assessment is expressed as having a positive contribution to one's own learning processes. The main aim of this study is to investigate the effects of self-assessment on the English writing skills of non-native students. The research was conducted at a state university in Ankara in B1 level, beginning at the second semester of the academic year 2014-2015 and lasted for eight weeks. The study used a pretest -posttest control group design. The required data for the research were collected by pretest and posttest English Writing Tasks, a scoring rubric, and an interview form developed by the researcher. Analysis of the data obtained from the pretest and posttest was carried out by two-way ANOVA for mixed measures, while content analysis method was conducted in order to analyze the data obtained from the interviews. As a result of the research, it has been concluded that writing lessons in which students practice self-assessment are more effective in improving the writing skills of students than writing lessons conducted by traditional means.

Online self-evaluation: the EFL writing skills in focus

“…However, it is concluded that the participants' progress in EFL writing is high, i.e., they are doing just ne about where they should be. This nding concurs with that by Cömert and Kutlu (2018), who revealed fostered writing skills at paragraph, language use, and content levels among EFL learners who employed self-assessment.…”

“…Writing self-assessment has been extensively researched in conjunction with a number of some writing skills-related aspects in the EFL context such as academic improvement (Abolfazli & Sadeghi, 2012;Butler & Lee, 2010;Elgadal, 2017;Fahimi & Rahimi, 2015;Sadeghi & Abolfazli, 2015;Heidarian, 2016;Cömert & Kutlu, 2018;Thongpai & Deerajviset, 2017), ability to write (Butler & Lee, 2010), autonomy/ self-regulation (Bar eld & Brown, 2007;Fathi et al, 2017;Ghadi, & Khodabakhshzadeh, 2016;Kostons et al, 2012), motivation (Heidarian, 2016), attitudes (Fahimi & Rahimi, 2015;Sadeghi & Abolfazli, 2015), accuracy (Butler & Lee, 2010;Rodliyah et al, 2017;Purwanti, 2015). Such aspects were found to have been affected by the EFL learners' employment of self-assessment in writing assignments.…”

“…Nevertheless, they expressed their comfort with getting feedback from the teacher to self-assess their writing products. Finally, Cömert and Kutlu (2018) suggested that EFL Turkish undergraduates who used the self-assessment strategy fostered their learning of writing skills at the level of the paragraph, language use, and content.…”

The Impact of Self-assessment on Academic Performance: A Meta-analysis Study

“…Tukey fence method was used to detect outliers by using interquartile range (Tukey, 1977). A few studies having extreme effect sizes as outliers were found and removed (Cömert & Kutlu, 2018 primary studies reporting 46 independent self-assessment experiments with a total of 7654 participants. It was found that most of the collected studies had multiple groups such as different schools, grades, and multiple assessments such as different subject areas, different self-assessment types.…”

The Effect of Self-Assesment on Students’ Self-Efficacy and Writing Competency

“…Cognitive domain consists of ideas quality and their organization, meanwhile linguistic domain consists of grammar, structure, vocabulary, spelling, and mechanics. It makes writing is difficult for the students (Fahimia and Rahimib, 2014;Comert and Kutlu, 2017). The fact that writing is difficult is proven by Dharma and Adiwijaya (2018) through their research on writing in senior high school.…”