Learners as Assessors

In the recent shift in educational theory from transmission of knowledge to transformation of knowledge and integration of knowledge with existing personal constructs and meanings, assessment has taken on new affective goals, in which the personal growth of the learner is becoming increasingly important. It is no longer defensible to use discrete-item testing of dubious constructs or to sample performance as a means of inferring underlying competence or abilities, if assessment is really concerned with providing information on learning. Instead, the need to understand performance itself and the processing (and affective) factors which influence it, suggest an integration of assessment and instruction, and a student-centered approach to assessment. This paper therefore offers some suggestions on how self-assessment might be incorporated in the Korean EFL classroom.