Investigating Students' Self-Assessment of Conceptual Understanding Using Self-Assessment Cards in Chemistry

Abstract

In 2014, the OECD team warned that regular assessment of students in Slovakia is not formative enough and proposed introducing "formative assessment elements" into the Slovak system of education. An inherent part of formative assessment is students' self-assessment, and one of its techniques is the self-assessment card. The goal of this research was to determine the correlation between students' self-assessment using the self-assessment card and their level of conceptual understanding. The method used to achieve this goal was a single-group quasi-experiment performed at a selected Slovak grammar school in Rožňava. The analysis results show that the dependency between students' results and their self-assessment is significant, direct, and high. Further results showed no statistically significant difference between students' self-assessment and the difficulty of the tasks (from remembering to analysis). It means that the students were capable of objective self-assessment at all levels of conceptual task difficulty from remembering to analysis -- they neither overestimate, nor underestimate themselves.