THE VALUE OF PAIRED COGNITIVE AND AFFECTIVE SELF-ASSESSMENT MEASURES AS ASSESSMENTS OF STUDENTS' INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT: A PERSPECTIVE FROM PSYCHOLOGY

Suppressing support for the validity of self-assessment recapitulates a history of behavioral scientists' deprecating affect and metacognition. Vestiges of this history remain in assertions that most people overestimate their actual competence, or that self-assessments of learning are random noise and offer no value to assessment of learning. Some behavioral scientists still treat the assertion that people can employ reflection to understand their own thinking as heretical, and scholars can still risk ridicule for studying self-assessment or teaching it to students. In 2016 and 2017, we published results of a study of 1154 participants in the journal Numeracy. Our study employed reliable and valid measures of self-assessed competence and demonstrable competence. The findings revealed that most people possess adequate self-assessment abilities, and showed how the accepted consensus about self-assessment rested on mathematical reasoning that had universally failed to recognize the influence of poor measurement and artifacts on interpretations of the paired measures. To date no one has been able to refute our findings, and in 2021 our present database of over 8000 paired measures replicates our earlier results. Removing the stigma against valuing self-assessment now opens opportunities for studying it. Here, we offer evidence from psychology to show why teaching self-assessment in any class develops students' self-efficacy, ultimately develops capacity for self-regulation and helps promote equitable learning for less privileged students. Employing knowledge surveys and active learning that incorporates metacognitive self-assessment is easy and makes learning and the process of learning visible to all stakeholders. We show examples of employing self-assessment to promote success in college classes, in prolonged faculty development projects, in programs preparing students for college as Bridge scholars and even in investigating the relevance of Carol Dweck's mindsets to learning. Educating produces assessable growth in disciplinary knowledge and skills plus assessable growth in understanding of self. Paired measures offer a new approach for assessing both.