Teachers support each student’s ownership of learning by providing clear end of course learning targets allowing students to develop their ability to reflect on their learning, develop their own learning path, understand their learning progression and set goals.

• Track progress visible to both the teacher and student to celebrate growth
• Meet with individual students regularly to discuss student progress, strengths, areas of improvement. Students are clear about what they need to learn or the skill they need to develop in order to get to the next performance level
• Give students opportunities to determine and monitor their own learning goals and learning path throughout the year that is clearly connected to end of course outcomes
• Allow students to reflect on their learning and explain what they understand and concepts and/or skills with which they are still struggling

Assessment is most productive for sustaining engagement when the feedback is relevant, constructive, accessible, consequential, and timely. But the type of feedback is also critical in helping learners to sustain the motivation and effort essential to learning. Mastery-oriented feedback is the type of feedback that guides learners toward mastery rather than a fixed notion of performance or compliance. It also emphasizes the role of effort and practice rather than “intelligence” or inherent “ability” as an important factor in guiding learners toward successful long-term habits and learning practices. These distinctions may be particularly important for learners whose disabilities have been interpreted, by either themselves or their caregivers, as permanently constraining and fixed.

• Provide feedback that encourages perseverance, focuses on development of efficacy and self-awareness, and encourages the use of specific supports and strategies in the face of challenge
• Provide feedback that emphasizes effort, improvement, and achieving a standard rather than on relative performance
• Provide feedback that is frequent, timely, and specific
• Provide feedback that is substantive and informative rather than comparative or competitive
• Provide feedback that models how to incorporate evaluation, including identifying patterns of errors and wrong answers, into positive strategies for future success

One important aspect of self-regulation is the personal knowledge each learner has about what he or she finds motivating, be it intrinsic or extrinsic. To accomplish this, learners need to be able to set personal goals that can be realistically reached, as well as fostering positive beliefs that their goals can be met. However, learners also need to be able to deal with frustration and avoid anxiety when they are in the process of meeting their goals. Multiple options need to be given to learners to help them stay motivated.

• Provide prompts, reminders, guides, rubrics, checklists that focus on:
• Self-regulatory goals like reducing the frequency of aggressive outbursts in response to frustration
• Increasing the length of on-task orientation in the face of distractions
• Elevating the frequency of self-reflection and self-reinforcements
• Provide coaches, mentors, or agents that model the process of setting personally appropriate goals that take into account both strengths and weaknesses
• Support activities that encourage self-reflection and identification of personal goals

In order to develop better capacity for self-regulation, learners need to learn to monitor their emotions and reactivity carefully and accurately. Individuals differ considerably in their capability and propensity for metacognition, and some learners will need a great deal of explicit instruction and modeling in order to learn how to do this successfully. For many learners, merely recognizing that they are making progress toward greater independence is highly motivating. Alternatively, one of the key factors in learners losing motivation is their inability to recognize their own progress. It is important, moreover that learners have multiple models and scaffolds of different self-assessment techniques so that they can identify, and choose, ones that are optimal.

• Offer devices, aids, or charts to assist individuals in learning to collect, chart and display data from their own behavior for the purpose of monitoring changes in those behaviors
• Use activities that include a means by which learners get feedback and have access to alternative scaffolds (e.g., charts, templates, feedback displays) that support understanding progress in a manner that is understandable and timely

Learning cannot happen without feedback, and that means learners need a clear picture of the progress that are (or are not) making. When assessments and feedback do not inform instruction or when they are not given to the students in a timely manner, learning cannot change because students do not know what to do differently. This lack of knowledge about what to improve can make some learners seem “perseverative,” careless, or unmotivated. For these learners all of the time, and for most learners some of the time, it is important to ensure that options can be customized to provide feedback that is more explicit, timely, informative, and accessible. Especially important is providing “formative” feedback that allows learners to monitor their own progress effectively and to use that information to guide their own effort and practice.

• Ask questions to guide self-monitoring and reflection
• Show representations of progress (e.g., before and after photos, graphs and charts showing progress over time, process portfolios)
• Prompt learners to identify the type of feedback or advice that they are seeking
• Use templates that guide self-reflection on quality and completeness
• Provide differentiated models of self-assessment strategies (e.g., role-playing, video reviews, peer feedback)
• Use of assessment checklists, scoring rubrics, and multiple examples of annotated student work/performance examples