Assessment support

Self-assessment

What is meant by "self-assessment"

Student with checklist - AI generated When we talk about ‘self-assessment’ concerning the teaching of students, we mainly mean that as a teacher we encourage and enable students to reflect on their growing skills and knowledge, learning goals and processes, products of their learning, and progress in the course¹. Learning students the skills to self-assess contributes to the development of transferable lifelong skills, such as metacognitive skills and reflective thinking, and stimulates students to regulate their learning process and become self-directed learners.
Self-assessment can be related to predetermined performance criteria for all students, but also to personal learning goals determined by each student.
Although the term "self-assessment" is very common, it doesn't need to be related to grading. More often, it is used as a formative strategy, to support the students in their learning and development process and help them to improve their performance.

How self-assessment can contribute to efficiency

Self-assessment activities benefit teachers too in terms of efficiency and effectiveness in guiding and assessing students. For instance if, as a teacher, you can stimulate students to reflect on and critically evaluate their progress, and skill development, identify gaps in their understanding and capabilities, and reflect on their work so that they know how to improve this before submitting it, this will save time spent on guidance and feedback and it gives a better chance of requirements and objectives being met in the end. But..., self-assessment activities also need guidance and practice.

There are a lot of ways students can be engaged in self-assessments. These can be low-stake activities, such as a quiz during a lecture by way of students can see whether they have understood the theory. Or high-stake activities, for which students might also get a grade, for instance having students produce a reflective report about their learning process and achievements or produce a reflective lab journal.

On this page, we focus on how self-assessment activities can be used for enhancing the quality of performance and deliverables. Thereby contributing to the effectiveness and efficiency of the assessment process of the teacher.

General tip
- Explain the rationale for self-assessment activities. How it will benefit the students' learning process and quality of their work.
Tips to use self-assessment by students to help them prepare for written exams
- Asking questions during a lecture, for example in the form of a quiz using Wooclap, contributes to self-assessment. Based on the questions, scores and answers, students can estimate what they have already mastered and what they have not yet mastered. This can be done at the beginning of the session (whether they have sufficiently understood the given material), at mid-term or at the end (whether they have properly understood what was covered in the lecture).
- Questions, small assignments, quizzes and mock tests in Canvas can serve as a means of self-assessment. The answers can be offered directly as feedback (for quiz questions, for example), provided separately (later) to encourage students to think for themselves first, or can be addressed in a lecture or tutorsession.
Tips to use self-assessment by students to improve the quality of their performance or deliverables
NB. A lot of suggestions related to peer feedback are also relevant for self-assessment actions and vice versa.
- Think carefully about the purpose and how you can facilitate this. Self-assessment activities can be related to a product or performance, but also to the working process or to the development of a skill. Think carefully about the purpose and how you can fascilitate this.
- Plan and schedule assessment moments so students will experience them as part of the educational process. During these planned moments, you can offer the opportunity to ask questions.
- Provide opportunities for questions after a self-assessment activity. The self-assessment activity, for example, when students check their work using a checklist, can lead to questions from the students. Provide opportunities for these questions (online or in class); this is a valuable learning moment for students.
- Provide assessment criteria for students to self-assess their work. Discuss these, or develop the criteria together with the students.
- Provide instruments the students can use, like a form with guiding questions, a checklist, or a rubric.
- Give students a good notion of expectations, e.g. to discuss examples of work of previous students in relation to the criteria.
- Self-assessment can precede peer assessment and thereby reinforce each other. Based on self-assessment, students can formulate targeted feedback questions for their peers.
- Provide guidelines for checking written products. Especially for written products, it can be advisable to let students "proofread" with the help of guidelines in a handout. This way a lot of writing problems can already be detected and improved. For a handout and example: Editing and Proofreading – The Writing Center University of North Carolina.
- Provide practice materials. You can make it yourself of course (and using AI might help you), but there are also sites on the Internet that may be useful to point students to (and they may already make use of it). For Mathematics for instance there are several practice sites for students, such as Math Insight, Pauls Online Math Notes, Mathematics LibreTexts, and WolframAlpha with explanations and practice exercises with answers.

Something to consider: Inner feedback happens all the time

Comments from teachers or peers do not constitute feedback until students process them, compare their interpretation of them against their work or performance, and generate new knowledge and understanding out of that comparison. The input is used to generate inner feedback. However, students generate inner feedback all the time, e.g. by comparing their thinking, actions, and work against external information in different kinds of resources, in guidance documents, journal articles, rubrics, textbooks, videos, and diagrams, and derived from observations of activities and others’ behavior. The question is: How can we unlock the potential of inner feedback? Help students to improve their capacity to generate inner feedback?

David Nicol (2022) created the "Active Feedback toolkit". In two videos the concept of inner feedback is explained [video 2 min; video 15 min].

^{1 Definition from}^{Student Self-assessment | Center for Teaching & Learning | University of Colorado Boulder}

Used and useful resources:

How to harness the power of self-assessment for students - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (vu.nl)
Guide to self-assessment. University of Dublin, Trinity College