Learning Strategy 7: Self Assessment

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Description

As its name implies, Self-Assessment is the practice of testing yourself to see how well you are learning the material you are studying or being taught. You have probably already used one or more kinds of self assessment in the past. This strategy page will give you some ideas about several ways to test your learning, to provide some variety to your evaluations.

Self-Assessment helps you learn in two ways. First, the mere act of going through the materials and creating questions or other assessments for them helps you learn the content. You pay attention, evaluate what is important, select a method of testing, determine the right answer. All these efforts provide learning experiences. Second, of course, you learn by taking the assessment and getting immediate feedback about your performance. The faster the feedback, the more effective it is for learning.

1. Gather Your Study Aids

The first step in the process is to gather the materials and study aids that you want to create tests for. These materials can be put into two general categories.

Primary Materials. These are the full-text, complete information sources you are working with:

  • books
  • articles
  • Web sites or pages
  • recorded lectures
  • presentations (such as PowerPoint decks)
  • videos
  • audio recordings
  • glossaries

Processed Materials. These are the materials you have created, that reduce or alter the primary materials to make them more useful to you.

  • summaries
  • paraphrases
  • lecture notes
  • study guides
  • outlines
  • idea maps

2. Create a variety of assessments from both kinds of materials.

Testing yourself by using several different methods will help you learn and understand the material better than if you use just one method. Here are some ideas:

  • Vocabulary Flash Cards. These cards can contain any two terms associated with each other, with the term on one side and the associated item on the other: word and definition, brand name drug and generic name, term and category (tomato/vegetable), symptom and diagnosis, poison and antidote, and so forth. One useful thing to remember about flash cards like this is that they should be run both forward and backward. That is, start by reading, say, the vocuabulary word and reciting the definition. Then, after a few trips through the deck, reverse yourself and read the definition and recite the vocabulary word that matches. (For a powerful and efficient way to use flash cards, see Learning Strategy 10: The Leitner Flash Card System.)
  • Question and Answer Flash Cards. Put a question on one side of the card and the answer on the other side. The answers can be a single word or date or number or they can be more extensive, depending on the topic.
  • Problem Flash Cards. These flash cards present a problem for you to work out on one side and the answer on the other. For example, one side might say “Convert 75 degrees Fahrenheit into Celsius.” and the other side will have the answer.
  • Cloze Test. This type of assessment takes, say a summary paragraph from your text or Web page, and replaces every fifth word with a blank. You then must, on the basis of having read the parpagraph in its original form, fill in the blanks with the missing words. Then you check for accuracy. The best use of this type of assessment is to get together with another student in the class and create cloze tests for each other.
  • Matching test. Create your own matching test. This might seem to be futile since  you will be so familiar with the answers that  you’ll always get 100 percent. But re-read that last sentence: You’ll be so familiar with the answers that  you’ll always get 100 percent.” The value is in creating the test. That’s when the learning takes place.
  • Matching deck. With this assessment method, you have cards with the term, question, or acronym and cards with the definition, answer, or explanation all present, face up, at the same time. Your task is to pair up the appropriate cards.

3. Use the pre-made assessments available to you.

Most textbooks and most courses have various study aid materials available to help improve student learning. Take advantage of some of these.

  • Practice exercises
  • End of chapter questions
  • Quizzes

4. Take the assessments and evaluate the results.

Assess yourself at regular intervals, such as daily or weekly so you can track how well you are learning. Ask yourself these questions:

  • What did I miss?
  • What’s my score?
  • Is my performance better, the same, or worse than last time?
  • How are my scores trending?

Engage in some self-monitoring activity (See Learning Strategy 4: Self Monitoring for more information) by asking some of these questions:

  • How well am I learning this material?
  • What changes or adjustments do I need to make in order to improve my scores and my learning?
  • Do the quiz results show any consistent patterns?
  • Where am I especially strong or weak?
  • Is learning the material becoming easier and/or faster, or still the same?

Finding a study buddy in the same class to quiz you, evaluate  your learning, praise you for right answers, and share his or her knowledge with you provides many benefits. You’ll find that you can study longer and with more interest and motivation than you can by yourself. You’ll also gather insights, tips, and other ideas about the subject  you are studying.

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