Using the self-evaluation as a motivational and learning tool

Abstract

Evaluation is an educational tool to promote effective learning that can involve students with more guarantees of achieving successfully the objectives. In this way, our objective is the development of strategies to improve teaching quality through the use of self-evaluation rubrics. To use rubrics as evaluation tool offers advantages regarding other resources. By means of the rubric, the students know before the evaluation the criteria with which they will be evaluated, which allows them a global understanding of the subject and to know the relationship of the different abilities. In addition, this tool is very useful to promote the responsibility of the students and, in short, to encourage a much more autonomous learning and for the student to feel part of the educational process. This educational research has been developed within the subject of Environmental and Occupational Optometry of the Degree in Optics and Optometry of the University of Alicante. The educational experience proposed in this project has a double objective: to promote the collaborative work of the student and to promote self-evaluation as an instrument of learning and motivation. The collaborative work to be evaluated consisted of the design of an oral presentation on aspects addressed in the subject. On the other hand, the teachers involved designed and elaborated an evaluation rubric through Corubrics tool. It contains fundamental aspects to be taken into account by the students. Thus, they could think about what they are doing, how they are doing it and identify what they have learnt in the classroom. The rubric is divided into 8 items that evaluate both aspects of the content and aspects related to their attitude. Each category was described with four levels, from 4 (very correct) to 1 (very weak). 43 students participated in this study who were divided into two groups (A and B). In each group, the students worked in subgroups of a maximum of 3 people, with 6 oral presentations in group A and 9 in group B. The evaluation of the oral exposition was carried out in a group way. In this way, the rubric was completed individually by the rest of the students without differentiating between the members of the group. Furthermore, the same rubric was used by the teaching staff. Regarding the results, it is necessary to look at different aspects. On one hand, with respect to academic results, 73% of the students obtained a grade of B, and the remaining 27% obtained the grade of D, which is a good indicator of the degree of involvement of the students. It should be noted that there were maximum deviations of 84% and minimum deviations of 10% between the grades given by the teaching staff and the students. In this sense, it is important to mention that many of the items were systematically evaluated with the maximum score by most students. For this reason, it was thought appropriate to modulate the final grade by means of different percentages between teacher (60%) and student (40%). Finally, the evaluation of educational innovation itself was carried out using a scale designed for this purpose. After the analysis of the results, it can be said that the proposed objective has been achieved. The degree of student participation has been high, as reflected in the academic results. On the other hand, this experience has been valued positively by the students. Therefore, self-evaluation can be considered as a very useful tool for learning and motivation.