 Well self-evaluation has to go on all the time. Like there's no better tool for student or professor than reflection. It's part of our process. In fact in the scholarship of teaching and learning very early we've learned that there's reflection in practice and reflection on practice. And it's the reflection on practice that strengthens us later in the friction in practice that makes us better in the classroom. So reflection, self-evaluation, is very very important for students and professors. I think the important thing in self-assessment becomes the kinds of questions you are you are placing in the self-assessment. What are the markers that you are placing in there? There are a lot of times where self-evaluation is is very useful and perhaps as a reflective practice exercise. So often it's pretty standard now that faculty will use the discussion boards in some format where they'll be having a conversation between either smart groups or the entire class. But the real power can come at the end where the student can evaluate how they contributed to that discussion. So doing some kind of peer evaluation not just necessarily ticking off things on a rubric but sort of saying how did I contribute to the discussion? How did I change the conversation? And that can be an assessment in itself that they could submit. Well self-evaluation is a process of developing that metacognitive awareness of so what's involved here? And I think that's crucial for students to develop an idea of what are you expecting and it creates a conversation then about the kind of evaluation that will go on in the course. An example of this might be you have a larger project or a large essay and maybe you ask you require students to submit something and as part of submission they also go through and fill in the rubric for themselves. Now you might not assign a great a large grade for that but it could be a pass-fail sort of thing where did they provide feedback or did they reflect on it in a way that is shows that they've actually considered their work and identified some areas that they need to work on. Peer assessment does something I like to think of it this way when I when I thought of it this way kind of blew my mind a little bit we have all these students doing something we give them all a task in the typical situation they all do their own they submit it it goes away eventually months later they get it back with some comments meanwhile there's the sea of other responses to that same question that that's all around them that it's a powerful source of information so I think by allowing students to see what their peers have done and in fact I like to actually ask them very explicitly to assess that work to point out if possible ways in which it could be improved so you can use peer assessment in a way that builds community as well by saying your task here is yes to find something that's not optimal but also to suggest a way this can be changed that will make it better than it currently is for the statistics move we also took advantage of peer assessment capabilities and so that we had the opportunity to have students write responses to questions about some results they have some analysis of some data so that they could actually demonstrate their levels of statistical thinking how what they could and couldn't say based on the results of the statistical analysis what the strengths and limitations were of the analysis and the conclusions that they could draw and again that was peer assess and which I thought was a really good tool and of course students learn a lot also by going through the peer assessment process and by reading what their peers wrote and thinking about how that relates to the rubric and how perhaps relates to their own response and their statistical thinking skills just develop further through that process the students are required to develop within their groups their own specific rubric for how they are grading one another and part of that is also a learning process because they'll you know some of the students will identify marks associated for participation and I have to pull out of them what participation actually means so that they can assign an appropriate value to someone who's showing up someone who's showing up and doing work and someone who's showing up and doing excellent work so peer evaluations definitely used it's I think for the most part it's been good because it's helped identify you know which students haven't been contributing and their grade is adjusted by their peers essentially so what I tell them throughout the term is that we're going to have peer assessment at the end I show them the first week of class what it's going to be based on which in essence is asking what percentage of the work in the group did each person do so if you have a four-person group and you're answering about the other three generally you'd like to see 33 percent 33 percent 33 percent is the answer to that question I also ask on a on a seven point scale how engaged was each of the others in your group in each week and how well prepared were they and incidentally I don't ask I don't ask in comparison to others I just ask on an absolute scale peer evaluation is another way to get students to be involved in the evaluative process if you want to be strategic about it it can actually reduce your workload if you set it up well but you have to help students get to a place where they can do this effectively and that can mean that you set out a framework for that or you have a discussion where you co-create that framework this peer evaluation can be formative or it can be summative I prefer formative because it's much more lower stakes and you're getting feedback on the process as opposed to the notion of this is going to be towards my grade what my colleague thinks so I have used it that way I don't think it's wrong you could petition it that way but it's I think it's much more effective if you use peer evaluation formatively and what you're doing there is that on the one hand it makes it look like the emphasis is on the information that the one learner is getting but in fact the whole process is one of metacognitive development where they're starting to understand that these are the criteria if you go back to the notion of some fundamental ideas of outcome-based education and using rubrics you want to bring the students into that process and how do you do that well peer evaluation