Understanding How Pupils Check Their Work

Providing opportunities for pupils to check their own work, either by themselves or with another student, is a valuable practice in education. This process encourages students to take responsibility for their learning and understand their strengths and areas for improvement.

Let's look at the options provided:

• self-assessment: This involves a student evaluating their own work or learning process based on defined criteria. When pupils check their own work, they are engaging in self-assessment. Working in pairs to check work can also be considered a form of peer assessment, which often complements self-assessment, but the opportunity for the individual pupil to check *their own* work is the core of self-assessment.
• self-correction: This refers to the act of fixing mistakes that have been identified. While checking work often leads to self-correction, the act of *checking* itself is the assessment part, not the correction part.
• selecting activities: This relates to choosing what learning tasks to do, not evaluating completed work.
• planning learning: This involves deciding how to approach a learning task or setting learning goals, which is different from reviewing finished work.

Therefore, the term that specifically describes providing opportunities for pupils to check their own work individually or in pairs is self-assessment, as they are assessing the quality or correctness of their output.