Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Studies in Educational Evaluation journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/stueduc The relationship between students’ prior mathematical attainment, knowledge and confidence on their self-assessment accuracy Anesa Hosein a, ⁎ , Jamie Harle b a Department of Higher Education, University of Surrey, Guildford, GU2 7XH, UK b Department of Medical Physics & Biomedical Engineering, University College London, London, WC1E 6BT, UK ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Self-regulation Self-assessment Accuracy Mathematics Higher education ABSTRACT The ability of students to assess their own performance accurately may allow them to self-regulate their learning through metacognitive monitoring. This research investigates factors affecting undergraduate radiation physics students’ ability to self-assess their work accurately in a mathematical subject test. The factors investigated are demographics, mathematics confidence, prior mathematical attainment and prior level of mathematical knowledge. Students’ accuracy of their self-assessment was found to be associated with their prior mathematical attainment and their overall mathematics confidence. Students with high and low prior mathematical attainment self-assessed more accurately than students who had moderate prior attainment. These results have implications for how students may determine their own learning strategies and the pedagogical use of summative self-as- sessments. 1. Introduction This paper investigates the relationship between the factors of self- confidence, prior knowledge level and attainment in relation to stu- dents’ accuracy of their self-assessment in mathematical subjects at the undergraduate level. Self-assessment is a part of the self-regulation process (Panadero & Alonso-Tapia, 2013; Zimmerman, 2008). Zimmerman (2008) explains that the self-regulation process is an in- ternal proactive process that students use to self-monitor themselves to set goals and determine future strategies. Self-regulation consists of a three-phase cycle: the forethought phase, the performance phase and the self-reflection phase, i.e. before, during and after an event (see Zimmerman & Campillo, 2003). Self-assessments occur during the self- reflection phase in which students are judging or evaluating themselves by reflecting on their metacognitive monitoring process during the performance phase (Panadero & Alonso-Tapia, 2013). Through self- assessment, students reflect on the event during the performance phase to help them create appropriate learning strategies for the future with the goal of improving their mastery of the subject (Nicol & Macfarlane- Dick, 2006; Pintrich, 2004; Schunk, 1990; Virtanen & Nevgi, 2010; Zimmerman, 1990). Therefore, self-assessment is a mechanism for providing internal feedback about the event. Students are hence en- couraged to engage in the metacognitive strategy of self-assessment. This strategy can improve students’ judgement of their performance and help them to monitor the gap between their performance and the required standard (Thompson, 2013, 2015;; Kruger & Dunning, 1999). Performance, in this context, is a mechanism that provides external feedback about the event. There are, however, contentions as to what signifies a self-assess- ment (see Panadero, Brown, & Strijbos, 2015 for review), particularly about how students assess their work, that is, whether it is a qualitative or quantitative self-assessment. Panadero and Alonso-Tapia (2013) in- dicate that self-assessments should primarily aim to help the self-reg- ulatory learning processes of a student and not only be an instructional process used by a teacher. Further, they indicate that to enable meta- cognitive monitoring, the purpose of students’ self-assessment should not be about the quantitative feedback on their performance such as a score but rather the qualitative feedback on how they can improve themselves, that is, the self-assessment should be ‘for learning’ not ‘of learning’. Whilst we agreed with this position, there is, however, merit in students being able to quantitatively self-assess or self-evaluate their work accurately, particularly within educational systems which assess them in this way (see Brown & Harris, 2013). Further, students often quantitatively self-assess their work spontaneously, particularly at the undergraduate level, which helps them in judging whether they have done sufficiently well to obtain academic credit (i.e. pass the assess- ment). Accurate quantitative self-assessment can enable students to be more realistic about their outcome expectations as well as having self- awareness of the level of perfection they are likely to achieve (see Panadero & Alonso-Tapia, 2013) which can affect the motivational and https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stueduc.2017.10.008 Received 17 October 2016; Received in revised form 31 October 2017; Accepted 31 October 2017 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: a.hosein@surrey.ac.uk (A. Hosein), j.harle@ucl.ac.uk (J. Harle). Studies in Educational Evaluation 56 (2018) 32–41 0191-491X/ © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. MARK