Checkpoint 9.3 of the Guidelines for Universal Design for Learning calls for students to “develop self-assessment and reflection” as they move towards becoming “expert learners who are purposeful and motivated.” I have written in earlier blogs about using Exam Wrappers and padlet (see earlier blog posts on feedback loops and self-assessment) as ways to have students reflect on their own progress towards and/or performance on a major assessment.
Evolving: Using a Google Form
As the most recent Module Assessment approached, I was concerned about making sure students had fully prepared. This Assessment covered three major, but disparate, topics–cross-sections, area and perimeter/circumference, and surface area. Although we had listed all of the topics on the study guide, I wasn’t feeling confident that students were using the study guide effectively as a checklist to ensure equal coverage of the topics.
So, I decided to try something else and I put together a Google Form where I asked a yes/no question on each topic, with the topics straight off the study guide and using the same language, followed by a self-rating scale. Here is a sample:
Looking through the responses from my first class to use the Form confirmed both my fears and also what my gut has always said about test preparation–my students struggle to balance their preparation across multiple topics. They generally default to studying the most recent topics, such as these responses about surface area (the final topic prior to the assessment)…
…versus these responses to cross-sections (the first topic of the unit):
Although I like the public nature of the padlet reflections I have done for other Module Assessments this year, I think this Google Forms approach was a better fit for students because of the nature of the topics assessed in the Module Assessment. After students submitted their responses to the Google Form, I saw the majority of them practicing cross-sections; in the past, I heard from students that they had forgotten to study the cross-sections, even when it was listed on the study guide. I am going to add this idea of creating a Google Form to model for students how to use the study guide effectively to my toolbox of strategies!
Universal Design for Learning 