An outlook on self-assessment of homework assignments in higher mathematics education

Sarah Beumann,Sven-Ake Wegner

doi:10.1186/s40594-018-0146-z

Sarah Beumann, Sven-Ake Wegner

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-018-0146-z

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Abstract

BackgroundWe discuss first experiences with a new variant of self-assessment in higher mathematics education. In our setting, the students of the course have to mark a part of their homework assignments themselves and they receive the corresponding credit without that any later changes are carried out by the teacher. In this way, we seek to correct the imbalance between student-centered learning arrangements and assessment concepts that keep the privilege to grade (or mark) completely with the teacher.ResultsWe present results in the form of student feedback from a course on functional analysis for third- and fourth-year students. Moreover, we analyze marking results from two courses on real analysis. Here, we compare tasks marked by the teacher and tasks marked by the students.ConclusionsOur experiments indicate that students can benefit from self-assessment tasks. The success depends, however, on many different factors. Promising for self-assessment seem to be small learning groups and tasks in which a priori weaker students can catch up with stronger students by increasing their practising time.

Highlights

We discuss first experiences with a new variant of self-assessment in higher mathematics education
Modern teaching methods aim to facilitate the latter to improve students’ learning success. They achieve this by using student-centered learning arrangements such as problem-based learning, research-based learning, or other methods that give the students more freedom, and assign more responsibility to them for their own learning outcome
When it comes to an assessment, often classical instruments, like graded homework assignments, weekly quizzes, or closed-book exams, prevail

Summary

Introduction

We discuss first experiences with a new variant of self-assessment in higher mathematics education. . .] is broader than self-assessment in that the student is engaged in more than just deciding what grade he or she should get.” It appears to us that in the classroom situations surveyed by Klenovski the students did not have the final authority about the grade, but that the teacher could intervene Self-assessment allows us to give meta-tasks to the students that cannot be marked by the teacher.

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