Estimating learning outcomes from pre- and posttest student self-assessments: a longitudinal study.

Area of Science:

• Medical Education Research
• Educational Assessment
• Student Learning Outcomes

Background:

• Learning outcomes are crucial for evaluating teaching quality.
• Comprehensive evaluation tools are needed to assess these outcomes.
• Student self-assessments offer a potential method for identifying course-specific strengths and weaknesses.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the validity of a novel tool using student self-assessments.
• To determine if self-assessments can identify specific learning strengths and weaknesses in a medical course.

Main Methods:

• 145 fourth-year medical students completed pre/post self-assessments on 33 learning objectives.
• Performance gain from self-assessments was compared to gain from matched formative examinations.
• Data were analyzed on both group and individual levels.

Main Results:

• Good agreement (r=0.78) was found between self-assessment and objective performance gain on the group level.
• Agreement was weaker on the individual level.
• A quality cutoff for aggregated self-assessments demonstrated high sensitivity in identifying learning objectives with favorable or suboptimal performance gains.

Conclusions:

• The self-assessment tool is easy to implement and considers initial performance levels.
• It provides valid estimates of performance gain during a teaching module.
• The tool can assist medical educators in pinpointing course strengths and weaknesses at the level of specific learning objectives.