About the Self Assessment tool
The Self Assessment tool enables instructors to provide students with a series of questions and automated feedback without impacting the student's course grade. The results of the self-assessment are immediately displayed to the student but are not saved, and will not be visible to their instructor.
Some examples of reasons to use the self assessment tool could be:
- establish start-of-term (or module) baseline knowledge
- self-evaluation to prepare for a quiz or exam
- opportunity to provide content/learning opportunities to students via immediate feedback based on answers
The ability to effectively self-assess develops with experience over time, so potential benefits are improved when more opportunities are provided.
Find the Self Assessment tool in the top menu bar, under Assessment.
If it's not there, please review our tutorial to learn how to enable course tools.
There are times when you require different types of feedback or reporting for the student or instructor. It's important to select the best tool for the task, so that these needs are met. Depending on your goals for the exercise, you may find that the Quizzes or Surveys tools are more appropriate.
You may find this comparison from D2L helpful when you need to decide whether to use Quizzes, Surveys or Self Assessments (external link, opens in new window) .
The Self Assessment tool looks and functions almost exactly like the Quizzes tool, but without grading, points values or difficulty ratings.
As the tools are so similar, you can use our Quizzes tutorials to help you build your self assessment.
To start a new self assessment:
Click on the "New Self Assessment" button and fill out the fields, giving your Self Assessment a unique name.
While creating questions, consider the following:
- Please note that there are a variety of question types available (see the "Create quiz questions" page for a list). Review the question types to choose the best type to meet your needs.
- Questions are posed one at a time, but can be presented in a specific order or randomly.
- Instructors can also include feedback for questions that can be provided immediately or as a report at the end of the self assessment. This can be a very useful way to encourage additional learning on a topic.
Where should I create the questions?
- Once you have created a new Self Assessment, you can add questions directly into the assessment (consider our "Create quiz questions" tutorial for guidance) by clicking on the Add/Edit Questions button.
- We recommend that if you have any plans to reuse the questions in other assessments, consider creating the questions in the question library and then import questions from the library into each self assessment or quiz that you wish to use them in.
- More guidance can be found in the "Manage quiz questions" tutorial.
Self Assessments attempts are not saved, and cannot be viewed by the instructor. If you would like to access a record of student responses, a quiz or survey will better serve your needs.
Since self assessments are not graded and have no point value, it is recommended that you provide feedback at the end of every question.
In some question types (like multiple choice), you can also provide feedback for each answer choice in a question, including details the instructor is looking for in an ideal answer.
All question types allow you to include feedback and hints.
Use feedback to provide additional information to improve understanding of content. Use hints to suggest how to approach a question.
If you want users to see hints for questions, you must enable hints when you create the self assessment.
