Formulating goals for learning and identifying standards
To what extent do students on your course have the opportunities to engage actively with goals, criteria and standards before during and after an assessment task?
Why?
- Students cannot regulate their own learning if they have little idea of where they are trying to get to
- Not knowing what is required is a known cause of poor academic performance and anxiety
- Being able to formulate goals for tasks is a valued professional skill, as is identifying the standards for good performance
- Identifying standards can be done before beginning a task and after the task is completed: these afford different but complementary benefits
How to begin
- Ask students to write out the criteria you gave them in their own words before an assignment and then have a discussion with them about this
- Ask student groups to examine and discuss the quality of assignment examples (e.g. from a previous cohort) in relation to the criteria you provided before beginning work
- Students evaluate some samples of work and create their own criteria from which you create a criteria rubric (using their words as explanation)
- Students evaluate the work they have produced against the criteria or against some exemplars of good performance (see Lipenvich et al., 2014)