Drawing students' attention to relevant assessment criteria: effects on self-assessment skills and performance

We conducted a study among students in secondary vocational education programmes in nursing and care (N = 68). The students work on learning tasks, self-assess their task performance and formulate points for improvement. We compared two groups of students on self-assessment, identification of points of improvement and perceived effort for the assessment task. One group was given a list of all possible assessment criteria for all tasks in which the relevant criteria for a particular learning task were highlighted. The other group received the same list without highlighting. Students in the relevant criteria group outperformed the students in the all criteria group on a test task, but they experienced higher mental effort in self-assessing their performance. Care students in the relevant criteria group generated more points of improvement than care students in the all criteria group. Nursing students outperformed care students on the test task and care students selected more criteria than did nursing students.