Self-assessment and Reflective Learning for First-year University Geography Students: A Simple Guide or Simply Misguided?

Abstract

A self-assessment schedule has been developed for first-year geography students at Curtin University of Technology. Its purpose is to guide students towards independent learning by encouraging them to reflect more on ‘what’ and ‘how’ they learn. Results of the 2003 and 2004 trials showed that the self-assessment schedule had a positive impact on student learning and was at least partially effective in improving students' critical thinking skills. It helped students to plan and organize their thoughts, describe the geographical characteristics related to their fieldwork exercise and indicated that students were generally positive about becoming more independent and reflective learners.

Keywords:

• Self-assessment
• reflective learning
• report-writing guide
• first-year students
• critical thinking
• independent learning

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank especially Roy Jones, Professor of Geography from the Department of Social Sciences at Curtin University of Technology, for his invaluable help and advice in writing this paper. Thanks are also offered to Dr George Curry for his invaluable comments during the final stages of editing, and to Dr Beverly Oliver and Dr Craig Baird from the Learning Support Network (LSN) at Curtin University of Technology for their assistance over the past two years. The authors also thank the students of Geography 111 (2003 and 2004 cohorts) for their cooperation and patience in completing both the self-assessment schedule and, in 2003, the questionnaire.

Notes

¹ Independent learning does not always mean working by oneself. Interdependence, or the ability to work with others, is just as important.

² Maguire & Edmondson do not indicate whether the student and tutor marks in their study are raw scores (i.e. whether marks are out of 100), or whether they have been converted to percentages from raw scores (out of 10 or 20 for example). We assume the former to be correct.