Student Self-Assessment

SA From the Assessment of Learning Point of View

In the traditional approach to assessment, or the assessment of learning orientation, the purpose of assessment is to gain information to make accurate and consistent inferences of students’ true abilities or the level of their acquired knowledge and skills. Thus, students are the object being measured and are external to the inferences being made. Based on this orientation to assessment, the self-directed and subjective nature of SA can be a threat to validity and reliability. Concerns have been addressed regarding the extent to which SA accurately and consistently captures students’ mastery of the target skills or knowledge.

The published research investigating the relationship between students’ SA results and their externally measured skill or knowledge levels (i.e., levels measured through objective test scores, teachers’ evaluations, and course grades) has shown mixed results. Correlations vary greatly. Although a number of studies report that students, at least among adult learners such as college students and trainees in professional courses, are capable of accurately self-assessing their own performance and knowledge, other studies do not support such claims.

Researchers have identified a number of factors that seem to contribute to the variability in SA accuracy (i.e., correlations between SA results and externally measured skill or knowledge levels). First, the accuracy of SA responses varies depending on the target knowledge or skills being assessed. It is known that students can more accurately self-assess lower order cognitive skills than higher order cognitive skills. Interestingly, students are also better at self-assessing their current skill or knowledge levels (i.e., absolute levels) than self-assessing the improvement of such skill or knowledge. Perhaps this is because using SA to assess gains in skill and knowledge requires judgments based not only on external criteria but also on learners’ self-reflected criteria, meaning that learners need to notice and capture changes in skill and knowledge levels by comparing them at different points in time.

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