2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Knowledge surveys (KS) are a self-assessment tool where the questions correspond one-for-one with learning objectives in a course. In response to the KS questions, students select a confidence rating that describes their self-assessed ability to demonstrate understanding or perform a skill. Pre-KS at the beginning of a course or unit of instruction serve as an outline of future learning objectives for students and alert faculty to pre-existing student capabilities. Students can access the KS questions continuously during the unit of instruction as a formative learning guide. Post-KS immediately prior to a summative exam enable comparison of student self-assessments of learning with faculty assessments of student performance.

Fundamental Hydraulics is a junior level fluid mechanics course required for civil engineering majors at a small university in the Western United States. KS were employed in eight sections of Fundamental Hydraulics from Spring 2019 to Spring 2021 with a total student population of 118. Prior research on KS in this course has shown that student self-assessments via KS are well-aligned with their exam scores. Given the data set in this course, we further explored relationships between student performance and their self-assessment abilities.

Results show that the correlation between student KS scores and their grades on each of the three unit exams in the course improves with each successive cycle of performance and feedback. We also examined the self-assessment ability of the student cohort by upper and lower halves of cumulative GPA, measured as of the semester prior to taking Fundamental Hydraulics. These data show that students in the upper half by GPA maintained consistent self-assessment accuracy through the three exams while students in the lower half by GPA improved their self-assessment accuracy by the third exam. Finally, we examined whether student performance improved in conjunction with the improvement in self-assessment accuracy. Although results are mixed as to whether student performance improved in a single semester, the self-assessment skills demonstrated by the entire student cohort, and particularly the improvement shown by the lower half of students by GPA, offers further encouragement that KS are a useful tool to support development of self-assessment skills and student learning.