​​Student self-assessment in outdoor education​ : ​​A phenomenographic study of teachers’ conceptions​

Sammanfattning

This study investigates how outdoor education teachers conceive of student self-assessment, a question that existing research has left largely unexamined. Self-assessment frameworks have been developed predominantly within classroom contexts, embedding assumptions about evidence, criteria, and learning that may not transfer when the environment becomes a dimension of the educational experience. Thirteen participants from Canada, Italy, Sweden and the USA participated in semi-structured interviews. A phenomenographic research design was used to map the qualitatively different ways teachers conceive of self-assessment in outdoor education. Findings are presented as an outcome space of five categories of description, arranged in an inclusive hierarchy of increasing complexity. The categories describe self-assessment as: A) a teacher-mediated process of verification; B) a process of measuring development over time; C) a process of epistemic self-knowledge; D) a process of emotional and somatic self-knowledge; E) a process of relational and social orientation of the self. Three findings were of particular interest. First, teachers across all contexts conceived of self-assessment as a developmental and ongoing process inseparable from learning. Second, the outdoor environment shifts in role across the categories, from a neutral background to a constitutive dimension of self-assessment, where embodied and relational experience provides the substance of what is assessed. Third, all participants acknowledged a structural gap between their educational values and institutional assessment systems. This thesis contributes a framework for understanding self-assessment in outdoor contexts, extending self-assessment into a field inclusive of the embodied and relational possibilities that outdoor learning makes possible.