The role of self-assessment in students’ writing portfolio: A classroom investigation

Self-assessment, an integral part of self-regulated learning, is defined as a study skill through which students are able to develop the capacity to think about their learning critically. More specifically, self-assessment in writing refers to a metacognitive skill employed by students to evaluate (1) the content, organization, and purpose of their own written texts and (2) their writing process including the selection of strategies, monitoring of strategy use, and assessing the effectiveness of those strategies throughout. When writing, self-assessment may occur within the pre-writing, while-writing, or post-writing stages and can be either formal or informal. This paper discusses a project in which students were required to self-evaluate one of the final drafts to be put into a portfolio during the last two weeks of a 15-week writing program. Copyright © 2010 TESL Reporter.