Self-assessment and competence
The term is used broadly
The authors try to delineate/define
Self-assessment - "personal, unguided reflection on performance for the purposes of generating an individually derived summary judgement of one's own level of knowledge, skill and understanding in a particular area."
Other terms - self-efficacy, self-concept
They use self-assessment as participle of the verb - the act of doing the assessment - rather than the noun - the assessment itself
Issues with definition
Differs from Boud and others
self-assessment: self-appraisal derived from internally derived perceptions and externally generated data
Unguided reflection
Individually derived
Prefers the term informed self-assessment
Role of video externalising data and video in informed self-assessment
Begs the question - Eva's definition of self assessment is essentially uniformed self-assessment. Of course it is therefore going to be inaccurate!
The problem
The research shows that uniformed self-assessment has a poor correlation with external assessment
People do not seem to know what they know (or don't know) - we all have blind spots
Self-assessed performance minimally influenced by external feedback in the form of test scores, grades or faculty assessments.
Are there studies on self-assessed performance looking at the intervention of external feedback in the form of video?
Davis et al - cannot rely on self-assessment compared to external assessment
10.1001/jama.296.9.1094
Therefore the standard is set by external assessment which is problematic in itself which will bring with it its own biases
Can video help to externalise the assessment?
People who are unskilled tend to overestimate ability, people who are skilled tend to underestimate
"The path to improved performance is directed training and feedback, not better self-assessment."
Can video achieve both aims?
Psychological underpinnings of inflated self-perception - the psychological immune system
Can video unlock or disarm this psychological immune system? What is the immune system's response to self as antigens?
"As a result, the challenge of enabling performance improvements becomes even more daunting in that calls to establish mechanisms for delivering data to the individual, while valuable, often fail to recognise the difficulty inherent in overriding the strongly formed opinions we all hold about our strengths and weaknesses"
Video as a mechanism to deliver data
Cold cognition - limitiations of memory and attention that can lead us to reinterpret data for the sake of reconciling it with our established view of the world.
The problem summarised:
- The accuracy of self-assessment is too context dependent to dependably guide performance improvement
- Inability to accurately self-assess (and recognise) our weaknesses actually ends up in us being overconfident
- The same processes that create our overconfidence prevents us from integrating external data
More shortcomings
Recipient is a much more important component of the feedback process (cf Stone and Heen)
Influences on reception of feedback
- Self-perception of performance
- Congruence between perception and feedback
- Perception of credibility and intent of the source of feedback
Might these be overcome by self-generated feedback with additional guidance from an external source? Video +/- peer or expert?
The irony
We cannot trust self assessment but should encourage it
We need to influence self-assessment but should not change it
We can best improve the accuracy by ignoring it
It plays a major role in performance improvement but should not be the mechanism for improvement, but rather the lens through which potential improvement can be seen