One of the most important skills for individuals to be able to judge their own progress, and the quality of their work.
In managing learning in higher education and the workplace learners need to be supported in their self-monitoring (in the moment) and self-assessment (aggregation of information from multiple past events of their work), independently of the educator (cf. Carless et al., 2011).
In higher education we need to consider how to embed opportunities to develop self-evaluation within the curriculum (Brown et al., 2016). It is essential to create “opportunities for students to develop the capabilities to operate as judges of their own learning” (Boud & Molloy, 2013, p. 698).
The importance of developing students’ self-monitoring skills and self-evaluation skills cuts across all 12 sub-dimensions of EAT. Self-assessment is fundamental to the self-regulation of learning (see Archer, 2010).
Supporting students to find their own resources and networks to support their understanding, and encouraging self-reflection and the development of self-improvement plans authored by the students themselves is important. In order for students to learn effectively they need the ability to accurately reflect on the effectiveness of their learning is key (Panadero et al., 2017).
Students need assistance in developing their abilities to calibrate standards for themselves using internal and external cues (such as marking criteria that they have been involved in developing) to predict their performance more accurately.
The development of these understandings is facilitated by the provision of explicit task criteria from the outset, and explicit modelling of self-assessment strategies as part of the learning process (Dinsmore, 2017, Panadero & Alonso-Tapia, 20113).
However, we also need to remove this scaffolding to help promote learner independence.
One of the biggest threats to self-regulation is the over-scaffolding of learning within Higher Education environments, so we need to be mindful of when planning transitional learning support activities for students.
This module will use three terms that all relate to the idea of self-reflective activities: self-assessment, self-evaluation and self-feedback. These are debatable terms, but for this module they will be used according to the definitions in this figure:
click image to enlarge
The module will firstly focus on why self-reflective activities are important to self-regulated learning, and how we can embed them into our assessment and other educational activities.