Context:

A study was conducted to examine the qualitative differences among academics’ experiences of student self-assessment. The investigation focused on the different ways that student self-assessment was experienced by 16 academics from a variety of disciplines and programmes of study. The consequent research findings describe qualitatively different conceptions that depict how academics understand and use student self-assessment which can be grouped as .

• Future-directed conception of SSA (complex)

• Programme-directed conception of SSA

• Teacher-directed conception of SSA (simple)

Read the following sets of transcripts and match them to the different teachers' conceptions of SSA in Mentimeter below:

Transcripts Set A

• Whatever I do, I give them all these assessment evaluation sheets so they will know where they are assessed and how we assess them. So they can prepare themselves in a way that they understand how they are preparing themselves towards the task and how, where, why we assess them below or above whoever.

• The outcome of the self-assessment is it’s either an assessment that is ready to be handed in or not…it’s a binary response. It’s either yes or no. And essentially it has to get to a yes before they hand it in. (Female lecturer, Pharmacy)

• I reserve the right in the reading guide to say that I have the right to change marks. I’ve had students who have attended one workshop and tried to give themselves four marks. I think that’s a little bit rich. So I varied in those cases. (Male lecturer, Law)

Transcripts Set B

• What would be the goal of self-assessment? Well to be able to judge your own performance better. To be able to reasonably, accurately say what you’re doing well in and badly. And I think probably I really like them to get even to the end of their first year with a world view that says you know, at any stage I’m monitoring how I’m going.

• So it’s just becoming another mechanism for making them conscious of the implications of their actions and it gives that opportunity to provide feedback that’s a little bit more contextualized against their own experience and not just my experience of reading the thing. (Male lecturer, Design)

• A couple of times during a semester the students do concept inventories where[by] they have a whole lot of concepts that they’re supposed to [know]…So they put it in. And then they put next to the things they don’t know what they are going to do about it. And the tutor comes around and discusses that with them. (Female lecturer, Computer Science)

Transcripts Set C

• And it’s really important that if you are going to be able to provide consistent quality and be aware of your own deficiencies so that you will be able to improve them, you’ve got to be able to look at your own work objectively. And set yourself some criteria. And this is what I’m trying to encourage them to do, I suppose, extend it from not just an educational environment but through the professional life that they are going to be leading for the next 40 years. You know, see it as a professional skill as much as an educational tool.

• And I do deliberately for the students link the process of self-assessment in their educational setting with the process of self-assessment that’s going to be essential in their professional practice. They learn an awful lot, I think, about their own tendencies, their own sort of constructs in relation to education. (Female lecturer, Nursing)

• Basically, I will accept anything from the students that have evidence that they have engaged with the process. I encourage students to make it their own. And I try to restrict my judgements to ‘Have they engaged in self-assessment?’ I am not judging the quality of self-assessment. (Male lecturer, Adult Education)