SCREE – Self Assessment

Contributed by:

Musostudy

Intended Learning Outcome:

To track progress and identify areas for work

Tool:

This is a self-monitored formative assessment tool. Hudson (1981) designed the Sequential Criterion-Referenced Education Evaluation System (SCREE). This is a repeatable measure which students can use to rate their progress through a module, based on set criteria such as the module assessment outcomes.

This has many uses where you want students to track their progress in a tangible way. It could be used just in the weeks leading up to an assessment or across a whole module.

Activity:

With the class, decide the criteria you want to measure progress on (this could be for module mastery, or a set of criteria personal to the student). Each week students mark themselves a 1 for having achieved the learning and 0 for not yet achieved.

How:

Once you have established the list of competencies they measure, you can just remind students to mark themselves (they could keep the list on a note-taking app on their phone or on the VLE etc.). You can decide when to pair and share or have group discussions on progress.

It is important that achievement is acknowledged but also the Not Yet is addressed with time spent on how to achieve mastery, what needs to happen next, what support is available etc.

It is a good idea when using module outcomes to unpack them, jargon bust and rewrite them in layman’s terms so everyone is clear of the expectations.

Some learning outcomes may not be covered until later in the module so you may want to only add the relevant ones as they come up. This will also help students to manage the feeling of being overwhelmed by so much to learn.

Examples:

In Music Theory, the list of skills being assessed includes – use the cycle of fifths accurately, build intervals and chords and work out the relative minor. By using this each week students can self assess their progress.

Large Group Teaching:

With large groups, you can either run this as a solo activity to generate goals (depending on the module) and then put students into groups to discuss/adjust their decisions or you could have small-group discussions which contribute to a whole-group activity of generating one list. Once the list is complete students mark themselves but could then Pair and Share to discuss. A large class could contribute to a Mentimeter vote for each item so you get a whole-class result and can see where most work is needed.

Online Teaching:

Success:

Students will be aware of the areas they need to work on and will be finding ways to achieve mastery of each skill.

Next Steps:

Once the Not Yet areas are identified TLAs can be planned to help achieve mastery. See RESOURCES below for more information on this.

This could work well with planning activities. For example, any planning and goal setting activities.

Links to other activities:

Acknowledgements:

Hudson, W. W. (1981). Sequential Criterion-Referenced Educational Evaluation: A Student/Teacher Assessment System. Journal of Education for Social Work, 17(1), 53–58.

Resources:

The Power of Yet: Do You Believe You Can Improve? by Sam Thomas Davies. Available at https://www.samuelthomasdavies.com/the-power-of-yet/
Carol Dweck: The power of believing that you can improve TED Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/carol_dweck_the_power_of_believing_that_you_can_improve?language=en