An enthusiastic and highly motivated teacher recently turned me on to John Hattie’s Visible Learning for Teachers.  In the book, Hattie details 138 different factors affecting student achievement and presents their effect size based on a meta analysis of over 800 different educational research studies.

I won’t pretend to be able to do justice to this well-regarded book by attempting to summarize it, but I am struck by the factor with the largest affect size (thus greatest impact on student achievement) that is listed.  Student self-assessment / self-grading tops the list of 138 factors as having the largest affect on student achievement.

Here at Naiku, we strongly believe in the benefit of student self-assessment (and formative assessment), and have known that it has been proven through research of contributing strongly towards accelerating student learning.  In Naiku, students can be asked to rate their confidence in their answer selection while taking a test – and provide justification for their answer.

 

 

 

 

 

Immediately upon submitting their test, students can see their scores / teacher rationale and reflect on their answer choices.  This metacognitive process of confidence and reflection helps students take ownership over their own knowledge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Even so, I did not know that it was #1 of 138 factors in Hattie’s compilation.  That is great, but also presents a significant opportunity for improvement as today students generally aren’t often asked for self-assessment.