Abstract:

One of the aims of the European Higher Educational Area (EHEA) is to involve students in all the stages of their learning process, since the traditional assessment methodology in which the professor holds all the power and make all the decisions does not match with the philosophy of the EHEA. In this sense, self-assessment has become one of the most popular methodologies for the constructivist learning. However, despite its widespread use, some professionals have doubts about the value and accuracy of the technique. One of these reasons is that in most of the published papers there are few replications involving comparable groups of students.

For that reason, the aim of this work was to evaluate the reliability of this assessment technique and its usefulness in the autonomous learning of the first-year students of the degree of Food Science and Technology of the Burgos University.

This work was carried out with first year students of the degree of Food Science and Technology during three consecutive academic years: 2018-2019, 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 with 37, 38 and 39 students respectively. In the three years, the self-assessment was carried out in the same subject and in the same task: a brief written report about some of the contents of the subject. They had to evaluate their work on a scale from 1 to 10. They set the grade according to a rubric provided by the professor and a checklist with different aspects related to the work that they had to fill before setting the grade. If the grade given by the student to his/her work differed less than 2 points from the grade given by the professor, the final grade of the task was increased a 20 %.

The results obtained in this work were similar during the three academic years studied, which demonstrate the reliability of the self-assessment tool. However, most of the students scored their work with higher grades than those given by the professor. The students who rated their work with the same or lower grade than the professor were the ones who got the best grades.

Keywords:

Higher education, self-assessment, autonomous learning.