On this page, we offer tips to help students learn better. These tips are based on years of scientific research we’ve conducted, which have shown dramatic improvements in learning.
Self-Assessment Plus Remediation
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.
Below are links to two sample self-assessment templates: one using math as an example and another using reading. These templates can also serve as models for other subjects.
Additionally, we’ve provided links to papers evaluating the effectiveness of this self-assessment technique: