Student Self-Evaluation : Fostering Reflective Learning

For several decades, college teachers have been asking students to engage in self-evaluation, to reflect on their academic work and describe and evaluate it in writing. Student self-evaluation is both a process--consisting of acts of reflecting, composing, and writing--and a product, a writtten document. Student self-evaluation does not obviate the need for student exams and papers, crucial indicators of student mastery of material or complexity of thinking. Rather, student self-evaluation supplements and complements that information by asking students to describe in their own words their learning and its value to them. This writing, and the conversations that faculty members and students have about it, can be instructional, illuminating, and at times transformative. Student self-evaluation is primarily a learning strategy, but it is also a promising assessment approach: while enriching learning for students, it also can help teachers and institutions learn about student learning. This volume introduces the many forms of student self-evaluation in undergraduate teaching settings and describes how student self-evaluation creates connections between learners and learning, knowers and the known, and the self and the mind. This is the 56th issue of the quarterly journal New Directions for Teaching and Learning.