Do accounting students believe in self-assessment?

ABSTRACT

In education, formal assessment focuses on summative assessment with the objective of allocating grades, limiting learning by students. Formative assessment, in the form of self-assessment, has been proposed as beneficial to student learning in various fields. This study explores the perceptions of accounting students of the self-assessment process after exposure to the process on three occasions in a facilitated environment created by their lecturers. The students’ perceptions on self-assessment were collected via a structured survey. It was found that most students did not self-assess unless encouraged to do so. However, once they were exposed to self-assessment in an environment supportive to such assessment, students were positive about the process. After the facilitated process, they believed that self-assessment would improve their overall academic performance and indicated that they would apply self-assessment in future. This research provides insight into accounting students’ perceptions of self-assessment in learning, demonstrating the importance of investigating the benefits from a student perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• Reflective learning
• self-assessment
• formative assessment
• accounting education
• accounting students

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank the guest editors, two anonymous reviewers, participants at the 2014 IAAER World Conference in Florence, my mentor Prof. Elmar Venter, and Mrs Saré Pienaar for helpful comments on earlier drafts of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 This intervention was the first time that many of the students were called upon to engage in self-assessment, so I chose calculation-based questions rather than discussion questions as an introduction to self-assessment. I wanted to make the results of the three sub-assignments comparable, so I used similar calculation-based questions in all three class tests. These calculation questions are not simple ‘right or wrong’ answers, because they are integrated, test various principles and contain multiple steps. Lecturers often emphasize to students that it is not about the final answer of the calculation, but the thought process going into each of the individual steps. It would not have been possible for students to score a high mark on the accuracy of self-assessment, unless they made a concerted effort to follow all the steps of each calculation through to their final answer.

2 Marks were also allocated for reflection questions, which counted 20% of each sub-assignment. The remaining 80% was allocated for the accuracy of the self-assessment.

3 Ethical clearance was obtained from the Research Ethics Committee of the Faculty prior to the distribution of the survey.

4 A limitation of this method is that students who did not attend the class did not have an opportunity to complete the survey. However, since class attendance is compulsory, I did not feel obligated to create an additional opportunity for data collection.