Another unit completed, another chance to reflect

Having just completed another unit in Calculus, I thought it would be appropriate to update the current step in my action plan.

Continuing on the journey to have student self-reflect on their learning, I decided to do 3 new things in this unit.

First step:
Even though we continue to generate “I can… ” statements as a class at the end of each unit, I decided in this unit, to collate the complete list before the assessment. Students were given a copy of the complete list as part of their review booklet. I smiled when one student exclaimed with excitement “Oh, she wrote them out for us in the unit!” – I’m taking this as a success in my books!

Second step:
At the end of the review period, I distributed the same list of success criteria but added a rating scale to each. Students were then asked to assess themselves on their current knowledge of the skills where 1 was “I have no idea what this is about.” and 10 was “I’m ready to show my knowledge”. They then handed in their reflection and had a plan to guide their studying. Here is an example of one student’s reflection.

I had asked students to rate themselves earlier in the course based on their ability to solve a particular question. This student would often rate themselves 1 or 2 on these previous ratings. It caught my attention that when the process was changed to rate on skills rather than specific questions, this student’s rated themselves above 5 in most criteria. To me, that was note-worthy.

Third step:
This last step was generated after reading a comment on my last blog post from @mwilcox. So following the pre-assessment reflection, I then asked students to self-reflect once more on this unit content once they had finished writing the unit test. Along with rating themselves using the same success criteria as the “I can…” list, I added one last question asking students for input on any area/skill/concept that they felt they didn’t have a chance to showcase on the test. A copy of the survey can be found here.

The results of the electronic survey were a great highlight of student knowledge in each skill. The responses to the criteria reflections varied and here are some examples:

The most valuable input were the answers to the last question.

My next steps:
Though the pre-assessment and post-assessment were done using different mediums (one on paper and one electronically), by intentionally not made the electronic survey anonymous, I have the opportunity to compare each student’s ratings. I can envision having conferences with each student to talk about their progress in the unit and helping the student create next steps in their learning.