Moving on From Self-assessment

Abstract

Self-assessment of knowledge and confidence is common in medical education, and there are both philosophical and practical to justifications for it. However, many attempts to establish a correlation between self-assessments of knowledge or confidence and objective measures of knowledge or skill acquisition have failed. While in some circumstances the inclusion or reliance of self-assessment may be warranted, for example when a study is specifically measuring traits or outcomes that rely upon meta-cognition or increases in confidence, it is more often the case that self-assessment is used as a substitute for more objective measures. This is demonstrably flawed, and PRiMER as a journal will be moving away from publishing reports that inappropriately rely upon self-assessed knowledge or confidence as the only study outcomes.