ABSTRACT
This chapter should give Andrea many ideas about how to teach and encourage self-assessment with her middle school reading students.
The ability to self-assess is central to middle school students’ success in school. To read well, students must be able to plan, use, and coordinate different reading strategies. Students must be able to set goals, monitor near and far progress to these goals, and determine that goals have been met. They must call on relevant prior knowledge and determine that it is appropriate. Students must do so in relation to increasingly complex reading materials and content area curricula. The ability to self-assess facilitates students’ growth and achievement in reading as it contributes to independence and success in school. This chapter intends to describe how teachers can help middle school students learn to self-assess in reading. Self-assessment is a collection of metacognitive knowledge, strategies, and
University of Maryland
mind-sets that middle school students use in the pursuit of learning (Baker, 2002). Self-assessment allows student readers to independently undertake, monitor, and complete the reading and reading-related tasks that they encounter in middle school (Paris, Wasik, & Turner, 1991).
