Learning to assess your own knowledge and performance are indispensable skills for a software developer. Here we'll introduce you to a few concepts and techniques you can use to assess your understanding of JavaScript (and more generally, software development) as you work your way through this curriculum.
Accurately assessing your own understanding is an inherently challenging task (we're naturally pretty bad at judging ourselves). This is only made more difficult by two main factors:
- You're brand new to this, you don't even know what you don't know yet! So how can you be expected to assess yourself?
- Programming is very complicated. Knowing where you stand is challenging when there are so many different directions you can go, and all paths are tightly inter-related.
You can't expect perfect results, but even trying to self-assess will improve your learning by leaps and bounds. You'll learn to notice when you don't understand something, how to identify & isolate that concept, and how to design exercises for yourself to reinforce your weaknesses.
- Understanding the SOLO learning taxonomy
- Collecting related exercises/examples that challenge you
- Decomposing these exercises/examples into component concepts
- Creating examples to isolate & illustrate the component concepts
- Formulating SOLO classified questions for these examples
- Answering your own questions
- Reflecting on this process to create your next study plan
- (noticing how this list lines up with the SOLO taxonomy)
- Study and understand the SOLO learning taxonomy.
- Deliberately practice the list of Learning Objectives from this markdown as you work your way through your favorite JS tutorials.
Each item in the list is more challenging than the last so don't expect to be able to do this from day 1. Effective self-assessment will not come over night, it will take lots of practice and programming experience before this comes naturally. Take this one step at a time. Master one objective before moving on to the next.
