Specification:

Assessment type:

Formative

Learning outcome:

Attitudes

Self assessment is a formative assessment method that increases the students’ awareness of how values are handled in an activity or a design process. The aim is to create conditions for students’ critical analyses through a formative self assessment process and to improve their confidence and proficiency in working with values in design. When performing a self assessment, the students make their acquired knowledge explicit, clear and visible.

Self assessment is a formative assessment method that enables reflection, which supports critical thinking and higher order learning. Self-assessment is defined as the process by which students make judgments about their learning, particularly their learning outcomes (Boud & Falchikov, 1989). When students conduct a self assessment and afterwards review each other's self assessments, they assess their learning through a dialogue focusing on how to handle values in the design process.

This assessment activity allows the teacher to see whether the intended learning outcomes of the teaching activity have been achieved by asking students to carry out a self assessment with a focus on how values are acted upon in an activity based on the suggested assessment criteria listed in the teaching activity.

By asking students to carry out a self assessment based on specified assessment criteria, the teacher can assess students' acquired attitudes in relation to how they have handled values in an activity, what methods or strategies they used, and how they would change their approach in a future learning activity.

After the teaching activity, ask students to demonstrate their acquired knowledge about values in design by carrying out a self assessment with a focus on how values are dealt with in their work.

Instructions to the students:

Step 1:

• Based on the outcome of the teaching activity, carry out a self assessment in written form on how you have handled values in your work. You may focus on:
• • What else could you have done to handle values in an activity?
  • What is the gap between the values that the design was planned to build on and how you handled them?
  • What methods or strategies did you fail to implement when handling values in design?
  • How would you change your approach of being value-oriented in the future when handling values in a design activity?
  • What are the approaches required to handling values in a design activity?

Step 2:

• Share your self assessment with the other students. You will also receive another student’s self assessment to review.

Step 3:

• Evaluate, through a peer review, the self assessment you have received. Focus your review by asking the following deepening questions:
• • Can you come up with any alternative to the proposed method about how to handle values in an activity?
  • Are the suggested approached of how to be value-oriented when handling values in a design activity aligned with your understanding and interpretation of the topic?
  • Are the suggested approaches aligned with your understanding of how to handle values in a design activity?

Step 4:

• Based on the peer review (received and given) formulate a conclusion for how to deal with values during an activity in forthcoming design activities and learning activities.

The following steps, are optional:

Step 5:

• Share the conclusions with the rest of the students.

Step 6:

• Read the other students’ conclusions to deepen and broaden your own reflection (and revise your self assessment if necessary).

In this assessment activity, it is important to focus on the students’ attitudes in order to capture and address the “visible signs of learning”. When doing an authentic assessment, it is important to focus on how the students through an external community of practice can apply or integrate their knowledge relative to the learning goals and relevant assessment criteria. That is, in what ways the students are able to translate and reflect upon new knowledge that they have acquired through the teaching activity up against a community of practice.

When reviewing and watching the students’ self assessments, it might be helpful to pay attention to the following optional proposals for focus points depending on the content of the related teaching activity:

• To what extent do the students meet the assessment criteria listed in the teaching activity?
• How broad and deep are the students' reflections about their own awareness of how values are handled in an activity or a design process?
• Can the students respond to the feedback from the other students and relate it to their design process?
• Are there obvious elements that the students did not address in their self-assessment? (maybe elements that are particularly strong/weak?)

For further professional development consider:

• Are there specific learning outcomes or assessment criteria that students are particularly successful/unsuccessful in demonstrating?
• Are there any exemplary self assessments, peer reviews, or conclusions that work particularly well in addressing the intended learning outcomes and assessment criteria (consider sharing these with the other students)?

Boud, David, & Falchikov, Nancy (1989). Quantitative studies of student self-assessment in higher education: a critical analysis of findings. Higher Education, 18(5), 529–549.