Accuracy of Student Self-assessment in Higher Education: A Systematic Mapping of the Literature

Abstract

Student self-assessment is an assessment strategy that provides educational benefits to students, such as the ability to evaluate their own work and self-regulate their learning. The purpose of this research is to present how student self-assessment has been applied in higher education through a Systematic Mapping of the Literature (SML) on the topic. The forty-six relevant papers showed that self-assessment is usually applied along with other strategies such as peer and teacher assessment. Educational gains such as improved academic performance, self-criticism, reflection, and accountability were observed by practicing self-assessment. Furthermore, of the 53% of the studies that mentioned the use of computer tools in the use of self-assessment, it was observed that two tools were necessary, one for the application of self-assessment and the other for data analysis. In relation to accuracy, no consensus was found among the authors, with 26% mentioning the use of Pearson's correlation coefficient, which does not meet all possible scenarios when comparing strategies such as self-assessment and teacher evaluation. A coefficient that allows measuring the accuracy of student self-assessment is suggested in this research, since the difficulty in measuring accuracy was a gap observed.