Nurturing Student Writing Knowledge, Self-Regulation, and Attitudes in Higher Education: The Use of Self-Assessment as an Inclusive Practice

Introduction

The current chapter explores the use of self-assessment (SA) in Higher Education Institutions (HEI) as an inclusive assessment strategy that enhances undergraduate second language (L2) students’ writing performance, self-regulation, and motivation. SA is widely known as ‘the qualitative assessment of the learning process and of its final product realised based on pre-established criteria’ (Panadero, 2011, p. 78). It is a key feature of autonomous learning (Panadero & Alonso-Tapia, 2013), which is defined as ‘self-generated thoughts, feelings, and actions that are planned and cyclically adapted to the attainment of personal goals’ (Zimmerman, 2000, p. 14). As an inclusive assessment and learning strategy, SA allows learners to reflect on their performance taking into consideration explicitly defined assessment criteria and identify where they are in their learning journey and what they need to do to achieve their final learning goals without causing unnecessary stress to themselves or to others acknowledging their limitations and setting higher but feasible targets.

Writing is a process learned through consistent writing, assessment, and feedback (Cho & Schunn, 2010) and presupposes that students know what good writing is (Andrade, 2008). Using SA allows students to detect what they need to do to improve their work (Bruce, 2001). Even though Kitsantas (2004) suggested that SA is a valuable learning strategy that could improve students’ academic achievement, attitudes and self-regulation, Andrade and Boulay (2003) report the opposite in terms of writing skills enhancement. However, they confess that this is the case when students do not have the necessary support and guidance while revising their work. The aim of sustained participation in SA is to detect and rectify learners’ mistakes while they are working on their assignment (Kitsantas, 2004) and, therefore, improve their self-regulated learning skills (Panadero et al., 2016). Effective implementation of SA necessitates sharing and negotiating assessment criteria before the learning process to allow students to understand their expected learning outcomes and organise their work accordingly (Panadero & Alonso-Tapia, 2013; Panadero et al., 2016).

Panadero and Alonso-Tapia (2013) explained that SA directly influences the two phases of Zimmerman and Moylan’s (2009) cyclic model of self-regulated learning by: (1) reflecting on the task and its components, taking the assessment criteria into consideration, and making decisions about the strategies they will use to reach their goals, and (2) monitoring their work, checking their progress against the criteria and completing their assignment making all necessary adjustments. Previous research highlights the positive impact of SA on L2 writing performance (Fahimi & Rahimi, 2015; Iraji et al., 2016; Mazloomi & Khabiri, 2018). However, most of these studies have disregarded the psychological writing-related factors. Writing is a complex process which pre-supposes the effective use of various linguistic and affective variables at the same time (Kellogg, 1996). Affective variables have been disregarded in the L2 writing literature (Han & Hiver, 2018). Moreover, since learning, teaching, and assessing is a dynamic procedure (Hiver & Al-Hoorie, 2016), students’ individual needs and differences and their specific learning context should be taken into consideration (Larsen-Freeman, 2016). While several researchers have explored L2 writing autonomy and reflection (e.g., Khodadady & Khodabakhshzade, 2012; Zeki & Kuter, 2018), there is a gap in the literature regarding SA and its impact on students’ self-regulation (Fathi et al., 2019).