The influence of task formats on the accuracy of medical students' self-assessments

Purpose. Accurate self-assessment is an essential skill for the self-direct ed learning activities and appropriate patient referral decisions of practi cing physicians. However, many questions about the characteristics of self- assessment remain unanswered. One is whether self-assessment is a generaliz able skill or dependent on the characteristics of the task. This study exam ines the self-assessment skills of medical students across two task formats : performance-based and cognitive-based. Method. In 1997 and 1998, fourth-year medical students at the University of Michigan assessed their own performances on ten stations of a clinical exa mination. The examination used two formats: performance tasks (the examinat ion or history taking of standardized patients) and cognitive tasks (interp reting vignettes or test results and then answering paper-and pencil questi ons). Three measures of self-assessment accuracy were used: a bias index (a verage difference between the students' estimates of their performances and their actual scores), a deviation index (average absolute difference betwe en estimate and actual score), and an actual score - estimate-of-performanc e correlation (the correlation between the estimate and actual scores). Results. The student bias and deviation indices were similar on the cogniti ve and the performance tasks. The correlations also indicated similarity be tween the two types of tasks. Conclusion. The results indicate that the format of the task does not influ ence students' abilities to self assess their performances, and that studen ts' self-assessment abilities are consistent over a range of skills and tas ks. The authors also emphasize the importance of sampling tasks while condu cting self-assessment research.