About the Self Assessments Tool
Use of Self Assessments allows instructors to provide students with opportunities to reflect on their learning with questions and immediate feedback for responses. Question types available in self assessments are similar to quizzes; however, student responses are not graded as self assessment questions do not have point-values or difficulty level indications.
Self Assessment results are not viewable by the instructor.
Several options for creating self-assessments that allow an instructor to view the results include:
- Create a quiz weighted at 0% (results will populate in the gradebook)
- Create a quiz that is not associated to a grade item (will not populate in the gradebook)
- Create a quiz that is excluded from the final grade calculation
- Use the Survey tool and make sure the survey is not anonymous (cannot be linked to a grade item)
- Use the Assignments tool to collect student work (consider using text submission type so students do not have to upload a file)
Self Assessments are best seen as practice opportunities for students. Self Assessments can be used formatively in a variety of ways. Use self assessments to create pre-assessments at the beginning of a course, a module, a chapter, or even weekly. This use of self assessment lets students gage how much they already know and then monitor their progress towards the course objectives. As students become more aware of their progress, they are also better able to take responsibility for their own learning. Since the ability to effectively self-assess develops over time and with experience, the more opportunities the better.
You can embed self assessments as part of your course’s instructional sequence by creating quicklinks to self assessments in Content. You can also quicklink to self assessments from other places in the course such as in Announcements or Content.
Each self assessment belongs to a single course and cannot be shared among other courses unless you copy your course material into another course.
Why Use the Self Assessments Tool?
Use Self Assessments in your course to:
- Self Assessments is a formative assessment tool that enables you to provide students with a series of questions and give immediate feedback to their responses.
- The omission of numeric evaluation enables students to make reflective learning and course material comprehension their main priorities during a self assessment.
- You can use self assessments as a way of enabling students to provide feedback on how well they think they are doing with course material.
- Answering self assessment questions can illuminate students to their own skills and development.
Instructor Tips & Best Practices for Self Assessments
- The Koehler Center recommends that you create all self assessment questions within Question Library. This enables you to reuse questions in various quizzes, surveys, and self assessments. All point values are removed when importing questions from Question Library to self assessments.
- To allow users to see hints to questions, select the Allow hints check box when creating a self assessment.
- Create sections to organize your questions into folders. Avoid creating subsections within sections to keep question organization simple and intuitive.
- You can also create categories to organize your self assessments based on similar or related content.
- Create question pools in self assessments to distribute a unique set of questions to individual users. Question pools pull questions from a designated pool of questions stored in Question Library.
- Use the integrated HTML Editor to insert a self assessment into a Content topic, Announcements item, or event via quicklink if you want to include other information with the self assessment.
- Use the preview option to test the accuracy of content before you release a self assessment.
