On Self-Evaluations, from GWS #116

Quoting Susannah Sheffer from the editor's note in GWS #116, May/June '97

"In the opening pages of A Sense of Self, I tell about Nicola, a 14-year-old homeschooler who was in a violin class in which the students were asked to critique their own performance. The other students were uncomfortable about having to evaluate themselves. Most of them kept turning to the teacher to check with her. Nicola was the only one who seemed to find it natural to look to herself for an evaluation of her performance.

Though I told this story as one in a series of examples of how homeschooled girls stand out with respect to self-confidence and trust in their own perceptions, I always felt that the subject of self-evaluation was fascinating in itself and deserved a closer look. There's so much talk in education about how best to evaluate young people, and so little talk about about the fact that being able to evaluate one's own work is an important skill. But think of the dependence that comes from having to rely only on outside evaluation, from having no idea how you "did" until you get the test back or see your report card or hear your teacher tell you what she thinks.

This is the kind of dependence that some educators think young people have to live with, but ...young people can be quite capable of looking critically at their work and evaluating their progress over time. Even when people are novices in a particular area, they are capable of discerning the gap between what they've done so far and what they want to do. ... It doesn't help a beginner to say, "You achieved 76% of what's possible." (which is essentially what grades do). Rather, it seems to me, beginners are looking for advice about how to close he gap between what they are trying to do and what they have managed to do so far.

Which is why thinking about evaluation inevitably leads me to thinking about goals. The deeper flaw in schooling's usual system of external evaluation is that the students are seldom setting and working toward their own goals in the first place. Self-evaluation only makes sense if you're asking yourself, "What am I trying to do, and how close have I come?" Otherwise, it becomes something more like, "I'll try to guess how well I have met someone else's expectations," and that mind-reading game is, I fear, more often than not what characterizes the ecperiments in which students are asked to give themselves grades. ... the key question - so often the key question in education - is: who's in charge?"