Implementing and evaluating a self-assessment mechanism for the web-based Language and Style course

This article reports on the project to design and implement a web-based mechanism for formative self-assessment, to be used as part of Mick Short’s online stylistics course, Language and Style (see the preface to this issue for details). Using the self-assessment mechanism, students can compare their own performance on extended academic tasks (the stylistic analysis of three literary texts – a poem, a piece of prose fiction and a drama extract) with benchmarked sample answers. In this article we describe the process of developing benchmarks for the self-assessment mechanism and explain how this mechanism works in practice. Finally, we discuss students’ reactions to the self assessment instruments, as part of our own assessment of their validity and pedagogical value.