Principle 1: Give students practice in 'formulating goals for learning and in identifying standards'

To what extent do students in your course have opportinities to engage actively with goals, criteria and standards before, during or after a learning task?

Why?

1. students cannot regulate their own learning if they have little idea of where they are trying to get to
2. not knowing what is required is a known cause of poor academic performance and anxiety
3. being able to formulate goals for tasks is a valued professional skill as is identifying the standards for good performance

How to begin

1. Ask students to write out the criteria you give them in their own words before an assignment and have a discussion
2. Groups examine assignment examples (e.g. from a previous cohort) before beginning work and discuss what makes some of a higher quality than others in relation to the criteria you provide
3. Students evaluate some samples of work and create their own criteria from which you create a criteria rubric (using their words as explanation)
4. Students evaluate the work they have produced against a rubric or some exemplars of good performance (Lipenvich et al., 2014)