NiamhFriel
Hunt (1982): Is this paper important and why? Self-feedback,metacognition
If you only read one thing. Read...
Hunt, D.W (1982). Effects of Human Self- Assessment Responding on Learning. Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol 67, No. 1, 75-82
Quick Summary of the paper...
The main point of this paper was to highlight that the processes by which knowledge and skills are learned are affected by a person's self assessment of the correctness of their own performance. It aimed to determine if self assessment (SA) responding affected learning. This paper examined the effects of self assessment responding on acquisiton rate in paired associates learning. Particpants were asked to respond to their degree of sureness that a certain answer is correct, either immediately before or after each answer.
The number of trials required for the learners to learn the names of eight tools when using (SA) was compared to subjects in three control groups, who either just performed the learning task or performed the learning task and pressed a single button before or performed the learning task and pressed a single button after.
What is Self- Assessment (SA) Responding?
SA responding requires the learner to indicate how sure they are that a response is correct, by pressing one of several buttons (each button has a different level of sureness).
It was hypothesised that engaging in SA would actually impair the performance of the subjects, since it directs their attention away from the learning task (this was not the case).
Is this paper important?
YES... 
This paper is of importance in some ways and these are outlined below.
It highlighted, contrary to the hypothesis, that SA would not interfere with learning. Initially the author though that this may take subjects attention away for the task, however this was untrue. Subjects who engaged in self assessment actually performed better than those who did not.
In addition to this, it provides the foundations for further work in this area. If self assessment can meet the needs of the learners in these circumstances (that is when idetifying tools) then it is possible that this finding could have large implications for higher education learning and teaching.
Finally, the system used for this experiment where students can press a button to highlight their understanding of a lecture could also have implications for higher education learning and teaching. By being able to gauge students understanding feedback can be given to both the student and the lecturer. Students can see what they dont understand an need to learn and in additon to this lecturers get minute to minute feedback on their performance and they can then adapt their teachng to more appropriatly to meet the needs of the learners.
NO...
While highlighting some things are crutial for learning the importance of this paper in terms of its implications for learning has to be questioned for several reasons.
Firstly, it seems that this task was a relatively easy task, the reponse was either correct or not correct. In actual edcational settings it is very rarely the case that learning is black and white (Think Perry and stages A-C!). Therefore it seems that this work may not be completely comparable to real life learning situations.
In addition to this, the task is not an task that requires a huge amount of effort or knowledge. It may have been better to use a task similar to one that may actually be used in educational settings.
Conclusions
Training/education may be more effective and accomplished more rapidly by appropriately requiring the learner to execute a self assessment response after each response to be learned.
This seems in line with the growing amount of work in the area of "active learning" and "interactive participation" which requires the learners to engage with the learning process in order to effectively succeed in their learning (Healey, 2005)
Problems
This paper focuses on teaching the student to do a specific job, in this case matching up pliers. Is this really learning or is it just training? This is the difference between eduction and training.
Does this kind of ability, that is idenifying pliers, give people the skills and abilites to work out how to do things fo themself?
It seems hard to see from this experiment how the students are learning skills that may be transferable to other aspects of their learning. Being able to identify and match pliers may not allow for transferibilty to other learning (which would suggest nothing had actual been learned, people had just ben trained). In other words in this task the subjects had possibly learned how to memorize, rather than learned how to learn.
In addition to this the trials only take into account the responses of undergraduate students and all conclusions are based on this. Since undergraduate students are a vey specific population it is fair to concluded that these findings may not generalize to other areas of learning with different populations.
This task may not be applicable to other kinds of learning.
Finally, this study fails to take account of other things that may impact of the effectiveness of self assessment such as motivation. Students must be motivated to use the strategies as well as regulate their efforts and cognition (Paris, Lipson and Wixson, 1983).
Key Reference
Hunt, D.W (1982). Effects of Human Self- Assessment Responding on Learning. Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol 67, No. 1, 75-82
If you want to know more...
Black.P and William. D (2001). Inside the Black Box. Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment. King’s College London School of Education.
This paper highlights the elements that lead to effective learning. Self feedback is only one of these, other elements included are; sharing the learning intentions, feedback (from tutor), dialogue and a combination of peer and self-assessment.
Muschamp, Y (1991). Pupil self assessment. Practical issues in primary education no. 9, Bristol: National Primary Center (South West), 1-8