Assessments of student performance in the clinical setting are often a source of concern, uncertainty, and fear for many nursing students. Clinical instructors may fail to recognize the importance of student self-assessment in the clinical setting. Like any other clinical skill, the ability to self-assess needs to be learned, guided, and developed by students through consistent, constructive feedback and specific observations. Clinical instructors should encourage students to assess themselves using a self-assessment tool to enhance students' critical self-reflection and awareness. The literature suggests that student self-assessment empowers students to take control over their own learning and development of critical clinical skills and simultaneously enhances their learning and achievement.1 In developing a clinical self-assessment tool for students, the educator can include skills that have been previously recognized as areas of weakness or low confidence for students in the program, such as Situation, Background, Assessment, Recommendation handoffs, interprofessional collaboration, intravenous placement, and ventilator management. As the semester progresses, the teacher should have ongoing discussions with students about their specific self-assessments and suggest strategies they can use to gain skills and confidence in areas of perceived weakness. A Likert scale can be used as a means of quantifying confidence, skill, and improvement. This will not only serve as a consistent clinical evaluation tool for student use, but it will also help to allay common fears and timidity associated with assessments and facilitate ongoing dialogue between students and instructors. In addition, identifying the skills that students feel are areas of weakness enables the clinical instructor to seek out specific opportunities for students in these areas.

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