Investigating the development of self-evaluation skills in a problem-based tutorial course

Abstract

Purpose: To compare students' self-evaluations of their performances with the evaluations they received from their tutors in a problem-based course.

Method: In the Occupational Therapy and Physiotherapy Programme of the McMaster University Faculty of Health Sciences in 1993-94, a study was conducted of the self-evaluation skills of 30 students in five tutorial groups. Repeated-measures analyses of variance, factor analyses, and Pearson correlations were used to examine the student's self-evaluations in comparison with their tutors' evaluations on six consecutive occasions over a 14-week period.

Results: Significant (p < .01) increases were found for both students' and tutors' evaluation scores over the six evaluations. A significant interaction was also found, with the tutors' evaluations being initially lower but eventually higher than the students' self-evaluations. Correlations between students' and tutors' evaluations rose in a sawtooth manner from .49 on the first evaluation to .84 by the sixth evaluation. There was a pattern of diminishing oscillations in the interobserver correlations over the six evaluations.

Conclusion: When combined with the steady increase in evaluation scores, the pattern of diminishing oscillations in interobserver correlations was interpreted more as evidence of a negotiation process between students and their tutors than as evidence of improvement in self-evaluation skills.