Abstract:

European education policy guidelines emphasise the strategic goal to improve the quality of school students’ learning achievements and to ensure the just assessment. Application of self-assessment of students’ achievements and progress is one of the simplest and cheapest ways to improve students’ achievements (Butler, Schnellert and Perry, 2017). Thus, recent changes in education systems require re-considering the roles of learners directed towards more active participation in the process of learning (Chin, 2016; European Commission, 2018). Self-assessment of students’ learning creates conditions not only for self-directed acting but also for becoming responsible for own learning (Wiliam, 2020) which has a highly clear social value: from external to inner responsibility (when students become initiators of commitments); from collective to individualised responsibility (there is no wish to avoid responsibility assumed by one’s free will); from responsibility as control to responsibility as self-control; from responsibility for the past to responsibility for the future (when responsibility is thought about not when something has happened wrong but before assuming it, assessing a situation, own capacities to act in it and so on). According to Taras (2010), empirical research works demonstrate that self-assessment is an important factor engaging learners in learning. When self-assessing, students have a possibility to self-develop skills of analytical thinking self-engaging in the process of the decision-making (Boud, 2013) where a student becomes a researcher seeking for a meaning while analysing own activities and results.

Following the provision that, when self-assessing, a person in social interaction or grounding on experience constructs or reconstructs personally meaningful knowledge, the research aims at answering a question how are the conditions for school students to self-assess their learning achievements and progress provided.

The research methodology grounds on provisions of social constructivism having it that reality is being created through personal activities; that people develop knowledge, experience in social and cultural ways; that learning is a social process; therefore, there is no place for passive development of behaviour (Ernest, 1999).

On the basis of the document content analysis, comprehensive education schools’ strategic documents regulating the procedure of assessment of school students’ attainments and progress were analysed. On the ground of the analysed components, conditions for self-assessment of students’ achievements and progress were revealed.

Keywords:

Self-assessment, achievements and progress of learning, social constructivism.