Enhanced Learning Through Self-Assessment and Self-Reflection

To enhance your learning journey try integrating self-assessment and self-reflection to assess your own learning to ensure you continually improve. Adopting a self-assessment and self-reflection approach will make you more capable, set clear goals and provide you with the opportunity produce quality work through the integration of ongoing feedback. Learning is a long-term pursuit, it is vitally important to stop every once in a while and understand how and where you are going.

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Transcript

Welcome to the Psychology Podcast with Dr. Paul. Edgy by name and by nature. The Psychology Podcast will provide you with a competitive edge from education through to registration. Dr. Paul supports your transformation into becoming a psychologist, counsellor or allied mental health practitioner. Now here's Dr. Paul. 

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, we're here on the world today. Welcome to the Psychology Podcast. My name is Dr. Paul. Don't forget whilst you're listening to this episode, hit the subscribe button so you never miss an episode of the Psychology Podcast. And you can keep up to date with all the latest tips and tricks to get you through from education to registration, no matter which mental health pathway you choose in your academic or educational or vocationally focused journey. In this very special episode, we are going to talk about self-assessment and self-reflection as two fundamental aspects to enhancing your learning. And in particular, we'll look at the way that you can get better educational outcomes through undertaking self-assessment or peer assessment or other assessment that's associated with things that are not formally assessed and through self-reflection on the way that you succeed or don't succeed given different pathway strategies for your educational journey. 

So sit back, relax and enjoy this special episode on self-assessment and self-reflection. So the combination of self-assessment and self-reflection is a powerful way to enhance the way that you learn. It also plays a really important role in the way that students can assimilate knowledge from the learning environment, such as through teaching, such as through integration with material. And as we all know, things that stick in your long-term memory are generally semantic based. That means they have meaning. And so in order to try and drive that meaning and learn the way that we learn things through the various educational streams, it's really important that we incorporate tasks that require us to think critically, reflect on our work and the way that we process in our specific learning style. And so these opportunities then allow us to identify the gaps in our knowledge or the gaps in our skill set or the way that we learn or we don't learn. And this conjures what's called deeper learning and a concept called metacognition. Metacognition is thinking about thinking. And so if you take that to an educational perspective, metacognition about assessments is really about thinking about the way that you learn best. 

So through self-assessment and self-reflection, you can evaluate the way that you work against specific criteria. You can look at how you track your learning progress, identify areas of strengths and weaknesses in your skill set and through your knowledge base, provide yourselves with some realistic learning goals so that you are not over-stretching your capabilities and know your position in place and time at any one moment. It also gives you a chance to reflect on your learning style and the way that you process information and then to basically act on this information and spiral up in terms of your progression in the way that you learn. We all learn in different ways using different means and so it's vitally important you reflect on this to understand how you learn best. 

Some of the great self-assessment and self-reflective strategy tools that you can use to implement in your learning and progress in your journey. And the first one is rubrics. These are provided by all good educational institutions. They really set out what it means to be in high distinction, distinction categorization, or if you're in a vocational area, will provide you with an understanding of what you need to do to demonstrate a behavior, to be able to get through your course or program. So these rubrics are provided by educators, including myself and others, to provide you with an outline of the objectives and expectations set for an assignment. And the set criteria that sits in these particular rubrics, they're usually in a table format. They provide very, very clear descriptions to show the levels of achievement against the criteria that have been set out for the assessment. And this gives you the best chance to understand what skills and knowledge you need to demonstrate to meet a certain level of criteria. Of course, you can plan your, I guess your strategies around how you want to go in that particular unit or grade or class or assessment item, and you can say, well, I really want a high distinction. And so you can look at the characteristics that are exemplar of a high distinction. And as long as you're able to fulfill those characteristics, and as long as your work is put and submitted into an assessor and the marker agrees based on that assessment of the rubric, you are really on your way to becoming quite a successful student when it comes to using rubrics as a powerful tool for assessment. 

When the self reflection comes in, is if you interpret the rubric in one particular way. However, you overstate your confidence in your abilities to meet those criteria and that differs from the markers, You can then identify the areas where you need to temper or whether you need to excel in a specific domain within the rubric, and that can then provide you with this powerful guide to understanding how you monitor and evaluate your own success as a student against what an external marker might view your success as. So using the rubric is a great handrail to be able to give you the best success on your academic journey. And I find that students that are very polarized on this next item really do either excel or struggle with this next tip for self-assessment and reflection. And that is either peer assessment and/or collaboration. And so these two aspects are vitally important when group assignments are required. Now people will either love group assignments or they won't like group assignments. that you've had a good experience with a group assignment or you haven't had a good experience. Let's talk about group assignments first. 

The object of a group assignment is to understand what it means to collaborate with others. At times, people in your group will want to contribute, won't want to contribute, or they contribute at different levels. And so it's your negotiation and social skills that need to provide this sensibility about how you all come together to produce this one output, whether it be a group presentation or a group assessment item. Having this practice of integrating with people who are very divergent and from very different backgrounds, trying to contribute with different stresses in their life and trying to provide this assessment item based on some sort of criteria, it can be a challenge granted. But it's also a great opportunity to seek feedback from others that in your group you're working together and when you do your contribution maybe it needs to be synthesized more maybe it needs to be integrated in a different way and so others in your group can provide you this feedback. 

Peer assessment is really different in that it is you either providing somebody else some sensibility about the work that you're doing, you would never do this for someone in your same cohort in the same subject, because in that way you're actually creating this condition called collusion. But if you've asked somebody to give you some support on your feedback, on your writing that doesn't have anything to do with the subject you're doing, it could not be deemed collusion, which is sharing information and writing something together when it's an individual assessment, it's fine in a collaborative sense, it's fine in a group setting, specifically where somebody says to you, let's do some work in a group setting and you need to work and contribute together, then you can collaborate and do some peer assessment over the work. But if it's an individual assignment, please don't pass it on to somebody who might be in the same cohort because you may be in trouble from an academic integrity perspective. 

You can create this sense of understanding based on feedback within the group or from an individual and this peer assessment and collaboration component can really drive self-reflection. The self-reflection for you is to understand what the feedback says, how does it integrate, what additional points has that particular person provided you in terms of feedback into your assignment for your benefit and how can you integrate it into the next amount of work that you might do on your journey. So for educators like myself to try and understand how we can provide students with a self-directed reflexive capacity to understand their learning journey, it might be really important for us to facilitate concepts within assessment items or within the course, in the unit's proper. For example, through learning management systems, they might be used to tasks, or they might be used to checkpoints, and you're able to put in a self reflection as you've read a passage that might be sitting in a Moodle site or Blackboard site or some other learning management systems site. And so this constant communication between educators and students to try and get them to reflect on what's actually happening is vitally important. It's so important that the current round of the accreditation programs for psychology and certainly within social work and certainly within counseling really focus on self-reflection as an important practice. 

Not only is it an important practice to understand how you will learn, it's also a vitally important practice for how you will practice. So self-reflection is a really important aspect or component and we need to make sure that we take on board the feedback and take on board our own sensibilities and ideas and concepts that come from reflecting back on what we've just done and improve as we go along. Slow, constant, incremental improvement is a significant predictor of outcomes in education and certainly in the programs that you're working in right now, this concept called grit, perseverance at task over time. 

Go and have a look at Angela Duckworth Lewis. If you want to have a look at her TED talk, she talks about this concept called grit. Grit can only happen in the guise of understanding what a self-reflexive approach might be to learning. Because without that constant incremental development and that persistence at task over time, the journey would just stay stagnant and it can't be stagnant for you to be successful. So self-reflection and self-assessment are two vitally important concepts that you might want to integrate into your education journey. Thanks for joining me on this episode. I really do look forward to catching up with you next time. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening. This is Dr. Paul signing off for another Psychology Podcast episode. (upbeat music)