Enhancing Student Learning Through Self-Assessment

First year engineering courses at Michigan Technological University have instruction and activities that address students' various learning styles. Traditionally, these courses have focused on increasing active learning through in-class examples, team exercises and design projects. Despite these activities, there have been several course topics where the students continue to have difficulty applying the principles to an engineering problem. To address this issue, in the fall of 2007, self-assessments were introduced to enhance the resources available for students. The assessments were a series of non-graded questions designed for students to explore the course topics in greater detail on their own time. As this was not part of the overall course requirements, student participation was voluntary. The questions applied lecture material to real world applications. The self-assessments were administered through Blackboard CE. Students were able to log into Blackboard, complete the assessment and receive immediate feedback regarding their performance. To enhance their understanding of the material, they could repeat this process multiple times. This paper will discuss student responses to this learning approach as well as assessment data to determine the effectiveness of this method as a teaching tool.