Making Assessment Matter – Building Intrinsic Motivation with Learners

Imagine you walk into your SmartLab tomorrow and ask your students, “Why do you have to document your learning? Why do I ask you to submit project assignments?”  

What would their responses be? How many of them would state reasons unrelated to their own personal growth and goals? 

In recent conversations with colleagues and facilitators in the SmartLab community, we’ve noted how critical it is for today’s students to understand the “why” behind, well, pretty much everything. Without explaining the purpose and helping learners to see the personal relevance, it can become a daily battle to get them to simply participate, let alone engage fully. 

In the SmartLab, we want learners to believe that documentation and assessment of learning is for them, not just for a grade. 

In this article, we’ll walk through three steps to making assessment matter for students: 

1. Connect learning to student interests and goals. 

2. Establish the purpose of documentation and assessment. 

3. Involve students through self-assessment and goal setting. 

Connecting Learning & Student Interests

Before the documentation process even begins, it’s essential for SmartLab projects to connect to what students are interested in and the long-term goals they have for themselves.  

Throughout the year, students will encounter SmartLab projects that have overt connections to their interests and goals. When there aren’t overt connections, this is your opportunity to facilitate them through questioning and goal setting. 

Questioning: As students brainstorm a project idea or explore the existing project starters, help them to make connections and build intrinsic motivation by asking: 

• What do you want to know about this topic? What interests you? 
• How could you use this technology to solve a problem or need that is important to you? 
• How do you think you might use what you learn with this project in the future? 
• How does this project connect to what you’re learning in other classes? 

Your students may not always have the answers to these questions. That’s okay! Share what you know and encourage them to connect with community experts for more information. 

Goal Setting: Writing SMART goals allow students to identify the success criteria for learning, which we know has the potential to considerably accelerate student achievement (Corwin Visible Learning Plus, 2023b), but also allows them to personalize their projects based on related interests and goals, which are the foundation for intrinsic motivation. 

Establishing Purpose

In the SmartLab, students reflect, document, and assess their learning in developmentally appropriate ways throughout every SmartLab project.  

Why? 

Some students may think assignments are solely for their teacher; so that they can give them a grade or know if they learned what they were supposed to learn. And yes, assignments ARE great sources of information about what our students know and how their thinking has changed. 

Reflection, documentation, and self-assessment have their own important benefits for students.  

When students reflect on and document their learning, it: 

• Guides students to make meaning of their experiences 
• Prompts critical thinking to deepen learning 
• Helps students express how their thinking has developed or changed (Ash & Clayton, 2009) 

The documentation also gives students the opportunity to look back at their work to: 

• Refer back to what they learned during longer-term projects 
• Notice what worked and what didn’t, increasing their metacognitive awareness 
• Aid in self-assessment and ongoing goal setting 

As the SmartLab Facilitator, it is your responsibility to make these benefits known to students through explicit instruction and frequent reinforcement. 

Explicit Instruction: Start by “talking the talk.” Take the time to explain the purpose to students. Describe the concrete ways that documentation and assessment will benefit them throughout the project cycle and school year. 

Reinforce the Value Frequently: For students to see and believe that documentation and assessment matters, you have to “walk the walk.” Model using it yourself, highlighting the purposes and their impacts. In your role as facilitator, it’s crucial to use documentation for those purposes by: 

• Guiding students to use their initial reflections about what they know and don’t know to guide their project goals and what they want to learn 
• Prompting students to refer back to their daily project journal to remember key information and reflect on how their thinking has changed 
• Involving students in self-assessment and goal setting, using their documentation as artifacts and evidence of learning  

Involving Students in the Process

Engaging students as active participants, and ultimately the lead decision makers, in the assessment process is central to the student-led project-based learning approach in the SmartLab.  

Involving students in assessing their work positively impacts student achievement (Corwin Visible Learning Plus, 2023a; Black & Wiliam, 1998) and motivation (Chappuis, 2009). In fact, Jan Chappuis, a Classroom Assessment Specialist, also notes that when students engage in peer feedback, it deepens their understanding of the success criteria, increases their ability to judge their own work, and leverages the social nature of students (2009). 

Our students are just like us. They need to understand the purpose behind their work. They need to see how it connects to their goals and interests. And they need to be engaged as the leader of their learning to increase their buy-in and motivation. When we do that, students see the value of assessment, and it becomes less and less about the grade or the checkmark and instead becomes a tool to help them grow.

References 

1. Ash, S. L. & Clayton, P. H. (2009). Generating, Deepening, and Documenting Learning: The Power of Critical Reflection in Applied Learning. Journal of Applied Learning in Higher Education, 1, 25-28. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1188550.pdf 

2. Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998). Assessment and classroom learning. Assessment in Education (5)1, 7-74. 

3. Chappuis, J. (2009). Seven Strategies of Assessment for Learning. Pearson.  

4. Corwin Visible Learning Plus. (2023a). Self-judgment and reflection. Corwin Visible Learning Meta^x. Retrieved from https://www.visiblelearningmetax.com/influences/view/self-judgement_and_reflection 

5. Corwin Visible Learning Plus. (2023b). Success criteria. Corwin Visible Learning Meta^x. Retrieved from https://www.visiblelearningmetax.com/influences/view/success_criteria