Critically evaluate one’s progress and skill development, identify gaps and understand where to go next, improve performance and, ultimately, be responsible for one’s learning processes. All this can be developed with the help of self-assessment.
Every year, college students are faced with writing a self-assessment. They write it as often as an annotated bibliography. Like many college students, you may be worried about completing your research project and annotated bibliography. We can say that these are such challenges that every student has to cope with. So, self-assessment or annotated bibliography, which is more challenging to write?
How to write an annotated bibliography?
An annotated bibliography is a comprehensive list of the sources you will use to write your research papers. There are several rules to designing and writing an annotated bibliography correctly. Students should not neglect such rules because the annotated bibliography is as essential as the entire work. Here are some steps for writing:
Step one: Work on your quotes
Each annotated bibliography begins with a reference list, a series of citations that your professor can use to find your sources online. Each department has its standard for citing academic sources:
- APA style;
- MLA style;
Once you know what style to write in, you’ll need to structure each quote correctly. After all, types of bibliography are cited differently, and sources with several authors have unique configurations. Many students don’t want to spend time on sourcing or think that writing an annotated bibliography is useless. Nowadays, this is not a problem. Every student can find a trustworthy service by googling “write an annotated bibliography for me” and be sure that the work will be done quickly and efficiently. That way, you’ll have an excellent example and be able to develop your sourcing skills.
Step Two: Summarize your sources
Once you’ve completed your reference list in APA or MLA format, you should start working on your abstracts. Each quote should accompany a summary of 2-4 sentences. Here it would help if you answered specific questions:
- What was the article, book, or website about?
- Who was the author? Was it one person, several people, or an organization?
If it was a journal article or scientific book:
- What were they trying to learn?
- Who were their objects or participants?
- What were their results? Did their findings support their original assumptions?
If it was an article in a newspaper, magazine, or website:
- How do you know it’s a reliable source?
- Who or what did they write about?
- Who was their target audience?
- Why was this article important?
- What did they try to convince you of?
At the end of each abstract, you should explain how your source will help you answer your research question, confirm findings from other sources, or give you additional insight into your bibliography topic. Creating an annotated bibliography is not such a challenging task for students.
Self-Assessment
Students are involved in self-assessment in various ways. Self-assessment can be different. It depends on age and students’ abilities.
Performance Review Self-Assessment
Ask students to write an essay about themselves or a self-evaluation essay. Students should talk about soy’s strengths and weaknesses in such a work. They should also talk about difficulties with learning, tell what they do better, and what problems arise. Not all students have the writing skills to write a perfect Self-Assessment essay. Moreover, self-assessment often affects the final assessment. Therefore, students want to be sure of the correctness of their essays.
In our case, this is not a problem because there is a lot of helpful information. Students can find essay samples. In the essay, it is essential to follow grammar rules, and the use of idioms is also highly valued. Each student can learn several idioms and use them in writing an essay. This way, the teacher will see that the student has taken the task seriously and is guaranteed to get a high score.
Keeping a Self-Assessment journal
At the end of each day, ask students to take 2-3 minutes to fill out a journal about what they learned. The questions can be:
- list 5-10 facts you learned while studying a new topic;
- write about the most exciting thing you learned today;
- that caused me problems with understanding.
Cards with Self-Assessment questions
Have students answer short questions at the end of each day or week. Questions can be printed on cards. Also, it can be Self-Assessment tests that can help to understand students’ personalities. Many people think that tests are only for young children, but even adults like such activities.
Conclusion
So, self-assessment and annotated bibliography are what every student faces. For some, this task may seem challenging a lot. But everyone can do it if you figure it out and approach work responsibly. The main thing to remember is that when you write a self-assessment or an annotated bibliography, you are developing. Such skills will come in handy in the future. You need not be afraid of challenges and believe in yourself.
