Dr. Leddo’s Blog

Students often read a textbook, watch a video, listen to a classroom lecture, or complete an assignment and think, “I don’t understand this.” The purpose of this technique is to help students self-assess their knowledge, identify gaps, and re-learn the material to fill those gaps. Our research shows that students who self-assess using this technique and then re-learn the material with the goal of addressing identified knowledge gaps score, on average, 1.5 to 2.5 letter grades higher than those who re-learn the material without self-assessment.

The self-assessment focuses on identifying how much of four types of knowledge the student has and what concepts are missing. These four types of knowledge are:

• Facts

• Strategies

• Procedures

• Rationales (the “why” behind the concepts)

The self-assessment technique is simple to learn. A student reads a sample transcript of someone assessing their own knowledge and is then instructed to perform a similar self-assessment for the topic they are studying. It takes about 10 minutes to read the sample transcript and a few additional minutes to complete the self-assessment. The student then re-learns the material with a focus on addressing the identified gaps.

One using math as an example and another using reading. These templates can also serve as models for other subjects.

• Math Self-Assessment Template: View Here

• Reading Self-Assessment Template: View Here

• History Self-Assessment Template: View Here

Additionally, we’ve provided links to papers evaluating the effectiveness of this self-assessment technique:

• Biology Self-Assessment Paper: View Here

• Spanish Self-Assessment Paper: View Here

• Reading Self-Assessment Paper: View Here

• Math Self-Assessment Paper: View Here

• History Self-Assessment Paper: View Here

• Middle School Math Self-assessment Paper: View Here