Online self-assessments need to be regular and reflective to foster student engagement and success

Abstract

Assessment plays a major role in student learning. It needs to be provided on a regular basis and include the aspect of reflective practice to be really effective. The purpose of this article is to highlight the results of how an academic in Electrical Engineering effectively used Blackboard™ to foster student engagement and academic success through regular online self-assessments that require reflective practice. A time-lag study is used with a non-experimental descriptive design. A total of 812 first-year engineering students were asked to complete weekly online self-assessments via Blackboard™ between 2016 and 2018. Results indicate that students engaged at least three times more with each section of the course content and that their pass rate increased by more than 20% when compared to previous years where no online self-assessments were used. These results tend to suggest that online self-assessments should include multiple attempts with some form of feedback to foster student engagement and academic success.