ASSESSING EDUCATIONAL QUALITY THROUGH PAIRED MEASURES OF METACOGNITIVE AND COGNITIVE GROWTH ACROSS INSTITUTIONS' UNDERGRADUATE RANKS

We compared the educational quality of institutions by using a large (N>9000) dataset of paired measures: self-assessed and demonstrable competence in understanding science's way of knowing. Our data, acquired with validated instruments, proved suitable to distinguish varying degrees of success by several institutions in educating their undergraduates. Results show that such measures offer a viable approach to documenting intellectual development and an alternative to more laborious and costly approaches that rarely capture the needed representative sampling of an institution's students. The ease of collecting sufficient data, its reproducibility, and the unanticipated insights we could acquire about the learning that institutions produced in their students surprised us. After sufficient participants stabilized class rank averages of both measures, each cross-plotted pattern proved unique and revealed each institution's development of its students' self-assessed and demonstrable understanding through the ranks. Deducing educational quality involved attending to the slopes of the best-fit lines, the correlation coefficients (nearly all R-values > 0.9), the distances between the points representing each of the ranks, and the ordering of ranks represented by the points along the line.

Scholars value assessments that can document intellectual growth across several years as the preferred indicators of student learning. The developmental stages of thinking deduced by William Perry Jr. indicate that intellectual mastery of disciplinary content and an affective understanding of self over time are essential to enable decision-making and actions informed by expertise and emotional intelligence. To date, ours is the only validated assessment that collects a developing cognitive understanding of content simultaneously with a developed affective understanding of self. Reaching the highest Perry stages, acquiring the proficiency for healthy self-efficacy, and gaining the self-regulation capacity needed for lifelong learning all require developing self-assessment skills. Self-assessment accuracy is important to academic and life success, but instructors rarely teach it by design. Self-assessment's utility for deducing educational quality remains barely explored.