There is little correlation between college seniors' self-reported gains in critical thinking and self-knowledge and their actual tested gains, according to a paper presented Monday, written by Nicholas Bowman, post-doctoral research associate at the University of Notre Dame.
The paper, released at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association, is based on the findings of a study in which the subjects took critical thinking tests during their first years of college and then again during their fourth years. "The Validity of College Seniors' Self-Reported Gains as a Proxy for Longitudinal Growth" is comprised of data from the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education. Data was first collected by testing college freshman in 2006, and then testing the same batch of students as seniors in 2010. Seventeen colleges and more than 2,200 students were used for the study.
"Higher education researchers often ask students to provide estimates of their own learning and development since entering college," the study reads.
Although colleges and universities may desire data to determine what students learn and how they develop and grow while in college, Charles Blaich, Wabash College director of inquiries, said the study cautions against solely using self-reported information to assess these changes.
"I think it's for schools that are trying to measure how they're impacting students," Blaich said. "Some are doing it so they can better themselves, and others are doing it for accreditation reasons, but I think this study shows that relying solely on student self-reports on how they've changed intellectually or what they've learned is probably not a good idea."
Although the study found that students were prone to overestimating their own growth, they were able to assess themselves slightly more accurately in certain categories, Bowman said.
"Some thought that they did gain a lot but didn't actually gain a lot," Bowman said. "[But] the correspondence between self-reported progress and longitudinal gains was the most different in the cognitive area of critical thinking and moral reasoning. Students did a bit better if they were looking at self-understanding or understanding students from different racial backgrounds."
In terms of time and expense, "it is easier and cheaper to test self-reported gains," Bowman said. "That comes with some considerable costs as well, if what you're really trying to see is learning and development," he said.
The quality of the tests depends on what the institution wishes to learn about its students, Bowman said.
"It's a problem if [colleges] use this data as actual measures of how much [students] have learned," Bowman said. "Student perception is not the same as learning and development."
Despite their flaws, self-assessments are not meaningless, Blaich said. They can show that students are "satisfied with their education, that there are good things going on at the place," and can reveal other valuable data as well.
"Any sort of self-reported data you have to take with the knowledge that it might not be entirely accurate," Blaich said. "That's just a problem with self-reported data in general. Even though it may not be telling you the thing you want to know, but it may be telling you something else important."
The study also found students at liberal arts and "more selective" colleges had more accurate perceptions of their development than students at other institutions.
"This makes sense to the extent that students at these colleges get more individualized attention and they talk more about how much they learn and grow," Bowman said.
To Bowman, the most surprising result of this study was that seniors were "only slightly better than first-year students at estimating their own growth," he said. "I thought the senior self-reported gains would be higher."
Bowman also expressed the benefits, however limited, of self-evaluations.
"You can certainly use self-reported gains but keep in mind what you're getting out of these and [do] not draw conclusions that the data just don't tell you," he said.
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