Assessing ‘inexperienced’ students' ability to self‐assess: exploring links with learning style and academic personal control

By Simon Cassidy *. 2007

125 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The study sought to establish the level of students' self‐assessment skill—particularly inexperienced students—and to examine the relationship between self‐assessment skill and learning style, student perceptions of academic locus of control and academic self‐efficacy. Students were asked to evaluate and provide estimated marks for their own work, were which compared with tutors' actual marks. Students also completed measures of learning style, academic locus control and academic self‐efficacy. Comparisons of student estimated and tutor marks indicated a good level of self‐assessment skill in the majority of students. A significant minority of students did however fail to exhibit such skills. There was also some evidence of a tendency for students to underestimate their performance. While both strategic and deep approaches to learning were shown to be positively correlated with tutor mark, only surface approach was negatively correlated with students' estimated mark, suggesting that surface learners are inclined to provide lower evaluations of their own performance. Deep approach was also correlated with accuracy of student self‐assessment skill, suggesting that deep learning is associated with self‐assessment competency. No clear or convincing associations between self‐assessment skill and perceptions of academic locus of control or academic self‐efficacy were identified. Findings suggest that while self‐assessment skill undoubtedly develops, becoming more effective during students' academic career, inexperienced students do have the capacity for self‐evaluation and should therefore be included in self‐assessment activities. In the light of findings related to learning style and the heterogeneous nature of student groups, student monitoring and skill development are proposed in order to allow the integration of self‐assessment into the learning and assessment process.

Subfields: Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d7a1bedcbef5c5aef0cccee069d247ec704b7715

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In Education

1. Zi Yan
2. Rebeca Soler
3. D. Nulty
4. David Boud
5. Gavin T. L. Brown
6. Diana Pereira
7. W. Alwis
8. Henk G. Schmidt

Citations in the corpus

• Peer and self‐assessment in the first year of university (2011, background): “If such differences are more pronounced (in the negative direction) among first-year students (itself a useful focus for future research – see for example Cassidy 2007, referred to later), they may not be regarded as good candidates for peer and self-assessment activities.”
• Self-regulated learning in higher education: identifying key component processes (2011, background): “( 2004 ), the precise nature and subtle conceptual distinctions within personal control beliefs described by Bandura ( 2006 ), and how these might be captured by psychometric measures which reflect contemporary educational contexts (Cassidy and Eachus 2002a , 2002b ; Eachus and Cassidy 1997 , 20”
• Sustainable assessment revisited (2016, background): “(Cassidy 2007, 315) While many authors have applied and discussed the original idea, some have gone further and established tools and methods to use it in the development of formative and summative assessment using self-assessment practices.”
• Accuracy of students' self‐assessment and their beliefs about its utility (2010, background): “Orsmond, Merry, and Reiling (1997) and Cassidy (2007) reported preliminary findings linking self-assessment skills with intellectual capacity: academically able students were indeed able to self-assess with greater accuracy.”
• A cyclical self-assessment process: towards a model of how students engage in self-assessment (2017, background): “…effect on academic performance (Brown and Harris 2013; Ibabe and Jauregizar 2010; Jay and Owen 2016), learning autonomy (Andrade and Du 2007; Cassidy 2007), commitment and engagement with learning (Brown and Harris 2013), and self-efficacy (Kissling and O’Donnell 2015) and is clearly an…”
• Assessment revisited: a review of research in Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education (2016, background): “Cassidy (2007) suggests that students should do self-assessment activities right from the beginning of their career in higher education.”