Weekly Self-Evaluations
As a part of the Integrating Developmental Instruction in Sustainability Context into an Undergraduate Engineering Design Curriculum grant that I was a Co-PI on with Eric Pappas (funded: $431,202), we developed an approach to fostering intentional self-development among students by metaphorically holding a mirror up to their faces. The process works by first asking students to articulate an "ideal" version of themselves, their vision of who their perfect selves would be. Second, we asked students to do a frank self-evaluation and indicate who they are right now. The cognitive dissonance between the "real" and "ideal" selves was almost always enough to motivate them to undertake some sort of intentional self-development project.
I built an automated system whereby each week each student received a personalized survey that asked them to:
- Set 5 personal course-related goals for the week
- Set an intention for how much time they planned to spend outside of class
- Assess how well they accomplished the previous week's goals and time spent
- Reflect on ways to improve their performance.
Here is an example of the weekly survey from one of my classes.
The automated system would send them an email at the same time each week and aske them to fill out the survey. The goals from the previous week were automatically populated in the new survey each week and were completely personalized to the student. This required custom programming, use of the Qualtrics API and integration into my own personally-hosted Wordpress websites.
I could use the weekly self-evaluations to keep track of which students were staying on top of the class. For those students who were slacking off or falling behind, I could follow up with them personally to find out why they weren't taking full advantage of the learning opportunity provided by the semester.
I don't think any sort of personal coaching system like this exists anywhere in education. The major downside of the system was that it took quite a bit of energy for me to read the students' responses and figure out which ones needed follow-ups. If I had more time to develop a system like this, I think it could foster quite a bit of meaningful student learning and development.