No-Nonsense Teaching: Assessment for Learning: Writing Self-Assessment and Parental Feedback

September 07, 2014

Assessment for Learning: Writing Self-Assessment and Parental Feedback

Involving children in the self- assessment of their own writing need not be onerous and can easily be incorporated into independent writing time.

As part of the writing process, children should be expected to complete a self-assessment for each piece of writing they publish (and some pieces that don't reach the published stage).

When practising a particular writing form or free-writing, I typically ask children to choose their best draft piece that they completed over the past two weeks. It is that piece of writing I ask children to work through the entire writing process. For the other drafts, I ask children to revise with a partner then move on to a new piece. Their best piece of writing during that time is brought through the writing process to publishing.

Once the piece is published, each child completes a writing self-assessment. The self-assessment includes the appropriate criteria, space to write their reflections and a space for parents/guardians to provide feedback based on the criteria. Children hand in their published pieces once their parent/guardian has provided feedback. This allows parents to be actively involved in the feedback of their child's work.

The teacher then uses the same criteria to assess and provides descriptive feedback.

During a writing conference, the child and teacher review the feedback, determine if the child's personal writing goal has been achieved and create a new goal.