Would you like to engage your students with Better Assessment?  With Benchmark Now! assessments, teachers have the option to engage students more than just selecting a correct answer to a question. They can use better assessment practices such as asking students to rate their confidence and reflect on their performance. Both practices are research proven self-assessment techniques that develop students’ metacognition, increase learning, and provide teachers a deeper understanding of student performance.

 

 

Confidence
As students take the test, they can rate the confidence level of their answer to each question.  Research has shown that this process of students thinking about their own learning is a very effective way for students to increase their understanding and better learn the academic content. In addition, student confidence is correlated with their answer selection as provided in the performance reports, helping provide a clearer picture of student knowledge.

Reflection
A corollary to confidence ratings are student reflections. While confidence ratings are optionally done during test taking, students can optionally reflect on their performance immediately after completing and submitting the assessment.

Students can not only reflect on their performance on the overall assessment, but also each individual question. When reflecting on each question students will see a reminder of the question, their answer, and any confidence (if rated).  They also see what the correct answer is along with automatically supplied answer/distractor rationale.  With this information, students can reconcile their performance and choose from a series of reflections such as “I Know and Understand” or “Simple Mistake”.  They also have an additional open journaling field to provide additional information to their teacher.

 

All of this information, including student answer, confidence, reflection ratings and any journaling, is provided in the Class and Item Results reports.