Alternative assessment: exploring the effectiveness of self-assessment practice among engineering students

Abstract

There are numerous ways available for lecturers to assess their students’ learning progress and one practical way is through self-assessment. Instructors should not under-estimate their students’ capability and interest in assessing themselves. Instead they should be given the opportunity to be involved in the assessment process. One salient advantage of this practice is to enable students to identify their own strengths and weaknesses in order improve themselves. The main purpose of this article is to investigate the implementation of self-assessment as a classroom assessment tool among engineering students in Universiti Kuala Lumpur British Malaysian Institute. Specifically, this study intends to investigate the accuracy of engineering students when assessing their own writing skill and the students’ and lecturers’ reactions with regard to the use of self-assessment as one of the classroom tools for assessment in a university language course. The subjects of this study were 137 diploma students from several engineering courses. Data in the form of written assignments were collected throughout the study and analysed via students’ own analyses and lecturers’ evaluation. The findings revealed that majority of the students, most of whom were Malays, would under-rate themselves. With regard to the use of self-assessment in the classroom, most of the students remarked that self-assessment is something positive and most of them viewed the procedure as a meaningful assessing experience.