Self Assessment

In post-sec­ondary edu­ca­tion, stu­dents are used to the age-old prac­tice of hand­ing in an assign­ment and ner­vous­ly wait­ing till it is returned with a grade attached. Flip­ping this process and encour­ag­ing self-assess­ment encour­ages stu­dents to be a real­is­tic judge of their own work and how to make room to improve. When stu­dents become more self-aware about their learn­ing and can take steps to make change, this is moti­vat­ing and helps them to devel­op self-direct­ed learn­ing qual­i­ties that will ben­e­fit them after col­lege life is done.

Self-assess­ment not only increas­es stu­dent self-aware­ness but sup­ports the stu­dent to set clear goals on how to improve and strive towards next steps in the learn­ing process. Self-assess­ment can be used in both for­ma­tive and sum­ma­tive ways using ideas from the exam­ples below. As you read, con­sid­er how you might incor­po­rate some of these into your course to sup­port stu­dent self-assess­ment.

Strategies to Promote Self-Assessment

Wrappers

Watch this video to the 5‑minute mark to learn more about self-assess­ment

Mod­ule 3: Self Assess­ment, Michi­gan Vir­tu­al

This guide from Cor­nell pro­vides many exam­ples of how self-assess­ment can be used using some­thing called “wrap­pers” for home­work or for an exam. The intent here is to have the stu­dent work through the ques­tions before and after the assignment/exam. Hav­ing stu­dents reflect on what went well and how prepa­ra­tion might change based on this idea also sup­ports metacog­ni­tion.  

Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty, Cen­ter for Teach­ing Inno­va­tion: Self-Assess­ment

Teach Any­where also has infor­ma­tion and exam­ples for you to work from: 

Rubrics

Rubrics can aid in the self-assess­ment process. This helps stu­dents iden­ti­fy areas for improve­ment and take own­er­ship of their learn­ing process, pro­vid­ing a clear frame­work to eval­u­ate their own work and gain an under­stand­ing of high-qual­i­ty per­for­mance.

The most com­mon rubrics are: 

  • Ana­lyt­ic rubric: Breaks down each assessed com­po­nent and pro­vides feed­back on each.  
  • Holis­tic rubric: Eval­u­ates the entire work, look­ing at over­all qual­i­ty and per­for­mance.  
  • Sin­gle point rubric: Sim­pli­fied ver­sion of ana­lyt­ic rubric, mak­ing it eas­i­er for stu­dents to inter­pret.  
  • EMRN rubric: 4 lev­el rubric (see below)  

To explore more, begin here:

This rubric was used in Prac­ti­cal Nurs­ing lev­el 1 for a reflec­tion assign­ment.   

In this exam­ple, stu­dents are encour­aged to add in their reflec­tion to the left-hand col­umn and the instruc­tor adds their assess­ment to the right side. The stu­dent assigns their grade and the instruc­tor agrees or alters with feed­back for ratio­nale in doing so.  

The “empha­sis” helps to guide stu­dents on where and how much effort to put into the sec­tion.  

Con­sid­er mak­ing a small Kaltura video with a com­plet­ed rubric exam­ple on screen to demon­strate to stu­dents how self-assess­ment works! 

If you want to inte­grate self-assess­ment into an assign­ment – con­tact CTLI for sup­port.  

EMRN rubric: Each let­ter can align to points as indi­cat­ed by instruc­tor: 20. 15, 10, 5 for exam­ple.