EHE Distance Education and Learning Design
EHE The Center for Digital Learning and Innovation
You are here: Home / How to Support Students Using Self-Assessment 

How to Support Students Using Self-Assessment 

Incorporating opportunities in online courses for students to check their own progress and understanding offers significant benefits for learning and retaining course material. This helps them develop stronger metacognitive skills for deeper engagement with content and greater success in their learning.  

Photo Source: Freepik

What Does Checking Your Own Progress Mean in Online Teaching?  

In online teaching, building in opportunities for students to check in with themselves about their learning is a powerful way to support them. At its heart, this is about helping students become more aware of their own learning process – sometimes called “metacognition,” which is simply thinking about how you think and learn. This awareness helps students not only master course material but also develop broader skills valuable beyond the classroom, such as time management, organization, and goal setting.  

This involves giving them structured chances to reflect on what they understand well about the course material, what concepts they find challenging, and how they approach studying and making sense of information. The goal is to make the learning journey more visible to students and empower them to take a more active role. 

Why Focus on This Kind of Self-Check?  

You might be wondering about the impact of adding these self-check opportunities to your online course. The key “why” is that it significantly contributes to deeper learning and student success, particularly in terms of understanding and retaining course content. Research consistently shows that when students engage in these reflective and metacognitive practices, it positively affects their learning outcomes and overall academic performance. Books like Intentional Tech by Derek Bruff, for instance, highlight the importance of these approaches for effective learning. 

Giving students chances to reflect on their learning helps them figure out their personal learning strengths and weaknesses when it comes to grappling with new ideas and information. They get better at identifying areas where they need to focus more effort to truly understand and apply the material, and they can try out different study methods to see what helps them grasp difficult concepts. This ability to understand and manage their own learning process is particularly valuable in the flexible, often less structured, online environment, where active engagement with content is key to retention.  

How Can You Help Students Check Their Own Progress in Your Course?

Ready to give this a try in your online course? Here are some straightforward ways to integrate opportunities for students to reflect on their learning and understanding of course content: 

Easy Ways to Get Started: 

  • Include Quick Reflection Prompts: Add simple questions within assignments, discussion forums, or at the end of a module. Ask things like, “What was the most important concept from this week and why?” or “What idea is still confusing to you?” 
  • Use Low-Stakes Quizzes as Check-ins: Design short, ungraded or low-stakes quizzes that allow students to check their understanding of key concepts after engaging with the material. Frame these as learning tools, not just assessments. 
  • Use Rubrics for Self-Evaluation Focused on Content: Share your grading rubrics with students before they start an assignment and ask them to use the rubric to evaluate their own work before submitting it, specifically focusing on how well they addressed the key content requirements. This helps them understand the criteria and think critically about their own output related to the material. 

Things You Can Try: 

  • Concept Mapping or “Summarize in Your Own Words”: After covering a topic, ask students to create a concept map showing the relationships between key ideas or to write a summary of the main points in their own words. This helps them process and check their understanding. 
  • “Assignment Wrappers” Focused on Learning: After you return a graded assignment, give students a very short task asking them to reflect on their performance in terms of their understanding of the content, the feedback you provided, and what they plan to do differently to better grasp similar concepts in the future. 
  • Prediction Activities: Before starting a new topic or module, ask students to predict what they will learn or what the key takeaways might be. After completing it, have them review their predictions and reflect on what they learned versus what they expected. 

Helpful Tools and Links: 

  • You can create and share simple templates for students to use for written reflections or checklists for evaluating their own understanding of topics. 
  • Let students know about university resources available to help them with effective study strategies for retaining information (See the ‘Student Resources’ listed in the EHE syllabus template for examples). 
  • Consider introducing the idea of ePortfolios, such as PebblePad. These can be great spaces for students to collect their work over a semester or program and reflect on their growth and learning experiences and their developing understanding of the discipline. 

Starting Small – Implement Gradually: 

  • You don’t have to add complex self-checks to every assignment. Pick one module, or even just one assignment within a course, to try out a new strategy focused on content understanding. 
  • Always explain why you’re asking students to do these reflection or self-evaluation activities – help them understand the value it adds to their learning and retention of the material. 
  • Share your own thinking process! When working through an example or a complex idea, you could say, “My first thought here is X, but then I stop and consider Y. This helps me make sure I really understand how these pieces fit together.” This models metacognitive thinking related to content mastery. 

You can effectively help your students build these crucial skills in your online courses by incorporating some of these ideas and supporting them to become more self-aware of their understanding. 

References and Additional Resources