Effects of student self-assessment in an engineering classroom

Abstract

Self-assessment has had much research done in the past, but has not been tested for its effectiveness in the classroom by the author. This study details the effectiveness of self-assessment on student achievement in an engineering classroom. Two middle school Pre-Engineering Technology (P.E.T) classes from a Title I school participated in the study with each class being split up into a treatment group and comparison group. All students were given pre-content, unit content, and post-content assessments with the treatment group self-assessing during each unit content assessment. All students participated in Likert Scale Surveys and students were picked at random to participate in interviews. After analysis of data, student self-assessment was found to positively affect student achievement and student confidence, in many cases, when defining engineering problems. The analysis of student self-assessment also proved to be beneficial to the author's teaching practices.