What is self-assessment?

Self-assessment is arguably the most powerful means for a tertiary education organisation (TEO) to understand and improve its educational performance. Self-assessment is a systematic process of data-driven self-reflection. It is directed towards coherent and clearly articulated goals to inform decision-making and operational practices.

Self-assessment across an organisation has four main components:

• Systematic data gathering
• Robust data analysis that leads to valid conclusions
• Reflective processes that involve all people in the organisation
• Decision-making for ongoing improvement connected to the outcomes of a self-reflective process.

TEOs generate and gather a large amount of data. Analysing and making sense of this data enables better decision-making. Good self-assessment is only possible when a range of people in the organisation are involved, e.g. teachers, non-teaching staff, students and other stakeholders such as employers.

Self-assessment enables a tertiary education organisation to find out:

• what outcomes, learners are achieving and how well
• the value of the outcomes to stakeholders including learners
• the effectiveness of processes in contributing to these outcomes.

By identifying strengths and weaknesses, a TEO can develop and implement an improvement strategy resulting in actual, worthwhile improvements.

Key features of effective self-assessment

NZQA does not prescribe how to conduct self-assessment. However, any process should be comprehensive, authentic, transparent, robust.

The focus of your processes should be on: