Feedback on new self-assessment function (after use with students)

[a_craik]

Some reflections:

First, I love that it's been built at all. It can start some really meaningful dialogues about metacognition and assessment literacy.

Second, it needs some more development work yet, such as:

1. There's currently no way to make this a requirement to complete - it sits only as an optional activity after the student submission. In practice, despite repeat reminders, not every student has completed the self-assessment. Adding an "optional/compulsory self-assessment" toggle to the assessment would solve this.
2. There's no oversight for teachers, other than viewing each individually in SpeedGrader. Some kind of flag icon in the grades screen could resolve this? Functionality to message students who did not engage with it maybe? This would still be valuable even if the "optional/compulsory self-assessment" toggle were introduced
3. The option to complete the self-assessment is tied to the assignment due date - does this mean the self-assessment can't be completed for late submissions? I didn't have any to check so genuine question - might be fine.
4. It took a while for me to figure out whether a student had completed the self-assessment - it's not intuitive as it stands. If there isn't a self assessment, there won't be a "View Student Self-Assessment" toggle in speedgrader. If there is, when I toggle it to on, nothing immediately happens. If I then switch the rubric view from traditional to horizontal, I can see the student rubric responses. I should note that the rubric I use requires free form comments rather than using predetermined scale points to select.
5. Further to 4, the student feedback comments all appearing in the comment library also thoroughly confused me at the start
6. [EDIT added 24/07] The feedback comments from students are clipped - no amount of page zooming or dragging the vertical bar wider allows me to see the missing fragments of text    
7. [EDIT added 11/09] I am unable to access the rubric in SpeedGrader for students who have not completed the self-assessment, meaning I can't use it for marking because they didn't. And as the deadline has passed, I'm unable to ask them to add their responses. If i click on the "view rubric" button, not only does a rubric not appear - the grade box disappears 

[ProfessorBeyrer]

Thank you @a_craik for sharing your experiences with self-assessment. I've been using it this summer and have additional comments.

Yes, it would be great to make self-assessment a requirement along the lines you suggest. What I did is have an assignment in the first week of class where I did not require it but gave feedback to each student saying that I would for subsequent assignments with self-assessments. For those students who submitted the assignment but did not self-assess, I put an assignment comment ("I will give you feedback once you complete the self-assessment") and then followed up with a Conversations (Inbox) message. I think I have one or two submissions without self-assessment, and I have yet to decide how to handle that at the end of the semester.

Another improvement that will be nice is to make self-assessment available via the mobile app. A near colleague of mine used it in the late spring and alerted me that it does not appear on the mobile app, so I included the following in my assignment instructions: 

Self-assessment can only be done via a laptop or desktop browser. It cannot be done on a mobile device.

After alerting those students who did not do the self-assessment for one assignment, one replied to me saying that he does not have a computer at home and would make a trip to campus the following day to complete the self-assessment. That struck me as un unnecessary barrier, so I had the student send me a message with their self-assessment. It was easy enough, and I'm going to include that as an option in my future assignment instructions.

Yes, self-assessments can be done for late submissions though it is a good idea to have a separate due date for the self-assessment.

I use the traditional rubric view with points so did not encounter what you did about student comments, but it was easy to see whether students had done the self-assessment in the SpeedGrader. I got into the practice of opening the SpeedGrader, selecting the Rubric button to see if a student had done the self-assessment, and then using the keyboards to check whether each student had done the self-assessment. Since I had that message about the requirement on my clipboard and ready to paste, I then selected the Comments field and pasted that message for those students who had not yet done the self-assessment. That part would have been easier if the keyboard shortcut to access the Comments field (c) was restored to the SpeedGrader.

The final thing I'm going to do is ask my students about self-assessment on the final exam feedback survey:

For some assignments, I required that you do a self-assessment before I gave you feedback. How much did the self-assessment help you complete those assignments successfully? (A great deal | A little bit | Not at all)

I'm happy that self-assessment is an option and hope that it helps my students learn.