Research tells us that teaching metacognitive strategies does a lot to increase student achievement. So when we help students "think about their thinking", we give them an important tool to improve their strategies for learning and help them in their journey towards content mastery. Even something as easy to do as asking a student to explain what they read to someone helps them to know what they understood and what they didn’t.

Asking students to “Show what you know” can also be an important self-assessment strategy that helps students to understand exactly what they had difficulty understanding. This is because the process requires them to identify what they struggle with and what they understand at a greater depth of knowledge.

When asking students to “show what they know” consider including some of the following indicators that learning is taking place in the project description. Ask students to:

explain something in their own words
make connections
recreate (rather than reproduce) information.
justifying their decisions
explain their thinking
offer analogies and metaphors of their own: Oh I get it – it’s a bit like...

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