Self Assessments

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Self Assessments allow you to create a quiz with a series of questions and immediate feedback for responses. Question types available are similar to quizzes, but student answers cannot be graded and self-assessment questions do not have a points value or difficulty level indication. Because self-assessments are not tied to grades, the hope is that students will engage in reflective learning and will focus on understanding the course material.

Self Assessment Best Practices

  • D2L recommends that you create all self assessment questions within Question Library. This enables you to reuse questions in various quizzes, surveys, and self assessments. All point values are removed when importing questions from Question Library to self assessments.
  • To allow users to see hints to questions, select the Allow hints check box when creating a self assessment.
  • Create self assessment sections to organize your questions into folders. Avoid creating subsections within sections to keep question organization simple and intuitive.
  • You can also create categories to organize your assessments based on similar or related content.
  • Create random sections in self assessments to distribute a unique set of questions to individual users. Random sections pull questions from a designated pool of questions stored in Question Library.
  • Use the integrated Brightspace Editor to insert a self assessment into a Content topic, Announcements item, or event via quicklink if you want to include other information with the self assessment.

Self-Assessment Feedback and Hints

All question types allow you to include Feedback and Hints. Feedback enables you to provide added information as a basis for improving content comprehension. Hints are useful for suggesting how to approach a question.

Since self assessments are not graded and have no points value, you should provide feedback comments for each self assessment question. You can provide feedback at the end of a question or in some question types (such as  multiple choice), you can provide feedback for each answer choice within the question. You can use feedback comments to indicate correct and incorrect answers, where a correct answer can be found in the course content, and what details instructors are looking for in an ideal answer.

Note: If you want students to see hints to questions, you must select the Hints option when you create the self assessment or from the Edit page.

How to Create a Self-Assessment

  1. Click the Self Assessments link from the Assessments menu on the navigation bar.
  2. Click New Self Assessment to create a new self assessment.
  3. Enter a Name.
  4. Select a Category from the drop-down list if you want to group your self assessment within an existing category. If you haven’t set up categories for your self assessments, click add category to create and name a new category.
  5. Select allow hints if you want students to access hints to questions.
  6. Click Expand page header/footer to add information or instructions to the top or bottom of the self assessment page. Change page header and footer visibility by selecting on or off.
  7. Click Save.
  8. Click Add/Edit Questions to add questions to the self assessment.
  9. Click Save and Close.

Note: You can edit all details for a self assessment after you create it by clicking the name of the self assessment on the Manage Self Assessments page.

How to Delete a Self-Assessment

  1. On the navbar, click Self Assessments.
  2. On the Manage Self Assessments page, select the check box for any self assessment you want to delete.
  3. From the More Actions button, click Delete.

Share Self Assessment Questions with other Instructors

You can share self assessment questions with other instructors by sending them to a learning object repository (LOR). This requires a separate tool, Brightspace Learning Repository.

  1. On the navbar, click Self Assessments.
  2. On the Manage Self Assessments page, click on the self assessment that contains questions you want to publish.
  3. Click Add/Edit Questions.
  4. Select the check box for any self assessment question you want to publish.
  5. Click Publish to LOR.
  6. On the Publish page, from the Pick a Repository drop-down list, select where you want to publish your questions to.
  7. Click Next.
  8. On the Metadata page, enter metadata details for the questions.
  9. Click Publish to LOR > Done.