Mentoring and tutoring your students through self-assessment

This paper describes practical procedures in mentoring/tutoring students through self-assessment (SA) to establish and maintain partnership in learning. High school teachers (n=10) allow their students (N=515: 359 males) to engage in activities that help them identify standards and/or criteria to apply to their work and make judgements about the extent to which they have met them. Although there are issues with student involvement in assessment and it is known/accepted that staff has the final say, students are mentored and tutored through a laddering process of decision-making that involves the use of SA modules. Detailed procedures for conducting SA training sessions and ways of formatively and summatively evaluating progress are presented in an easy-to-follow format. A final question and answer section further clarifies issues that some readers may have. Parents, teachers, students and other stakeholders may benefit from the methods outlined in this paper.