The Future of Education

The participation of students in the assessment process is seen as a considerable way to facilitate the development of some crucial skills for the teaching profession such as responsibility, judgement, and autonomy. The process of self-assessment encourage students to think critically and to understand how to improve their own learning process. Besides promoting learning skills and abilities, self-assessment practices advance the quality of performance and outcomes. Since self-assessment motivates students and encourages their active involvement to learning, also leads to more directed and effective learning, the use of these assessment tasks in teacher education has been supported by researchers. This study is aimed at using self-assessment in teacher education in order to examine the ways and consequences of applying self-assessment practices in teacher training program.

The participants in this study were thirty-three pre-service teachers at a state university in Turkey. Each of the pre-service teachers were expected to deliver a teaching practice including an application of a teaching method. Pre-service teachers' performances assessed by themselves through a self-assessment form. First part of this form composed of a criteria based scoring matrix and the second part consists of written questions. First part of the self-assessment form based on divergent competencies required for effective teaching such as comprehensible expression, effective application, being planned and controlled, management of time, using body language, gesture and facial expression efficiently. These specific criteria related with the objectives of the course were organized in a scoring matrix with informative instructions in order to provide effective and objective assessment tasks. Written questions of the self-assessment form include six open-ended questions for revealing pre-service teachers' perceptions about their own performances.

Analyses of the criteria based scoring matrix showed that pre-service teachers perceive themselves best at 'using body language, gesture and facial expression efficiently' and worst at 'effective application' through the given criteria. They also think that they are good at 'comprehensible expression', on the other hand they challenged at 'being planned and controlled' and 'management of time'. Pre-service teachers' responses to the written questions showed that they generally had difficulty in following the teaching plan. They stated that the difficult points were presenting effective examples, ensuring active participation of the students and also establishing classroom control. Pre-service teachers found themselves weak at effective presentation, answering questions and public speaking. In addition to all these, pre-service teachers' specified that they learned about the classroom management, with a teaching plan the course content could be teach effectively and there can be unexpected situations.