SELF-ASSESSMENT: CHARACTERISTICS, TYPES, ADVANTAGES, EXAMPLE - ECONOMÍA - 2025

Self- assessment is a tool used to examine one's own work quality, performance, skills, or attitudes. It is a resource that can be used in many areas, although it is especially used in the workplace and within the educational system, as a complement to other more traditional evaluation systems.

Unlike other performance appraisal processes, self-assessment places all responsibility on the person who is performing a particular task. Thus, you are given a greater sense of control, since you have to be aware not only of having a good performance, but also of examining the way you are acting.

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Self-assessment, therefore, can be a very useful tool for generating personal responsibility, motivation, and other useful emotions and attitudes in various settings. However, to achieve these positive results, it must be carried out properly, something not always easy to achieve.

In fact, the biggest disadvantage of self-evaluation is that it requires concentration and effort on the part of the person who is going to carry it out, who must also be sufficiently trained in the procedure to achieve good results. Even so, despite this drawback, it is a very useful resource in certain situations.

characteristics

Self-evaluation differs from other systems of examining performance mainly because the person who is carrying out the evaluation is the same person who has carried out a task or learning.

This is in contrast to other alternatives, in which the examiner is an expert in the area (hetero-evaluation or external evaluation) or an equal (peer to peer evaluation).

This evaluation system is not yet very widespread, because it goes against the usual practices within the current educational system. However, both in this field and in others, such as the world of work, sports or psychology, it has been increasingly popular for several decades.

As with the other two main evaluation systems, looking at your own performance has both advantages and disadvantages. The choice of this method over any of the others will depend on the specific area in which it is to be used and what is needed at all times.

Types

Self-assessment is used in a very similar way in all situations, with a series of tools and procedures common to all processes that use it. Therefore, the most common way to classify this system has to do with the fields in which it is applied. The most common are the following:

Formal and informal education

In this area, students can use self-assessment to see what their strengths and weaknesses are, where they need to improve, and what mistakes they are making in their learning processes.

Laboral life

A worker, entrepreneur or entrepreneur can get a lot out of the evaluation tools. The objective of carrying out such a process in the workplace will be to discover what areas need improvement, what mistakes are preventing progress at work, and what actions can be taken to prevent them from happening again in the future.

Health

Self-assessment is a fundamental method for those who want to work on aspects such as their sports performance, their diet or their general health.

Despite the fact that the help of a professional can be crucial to meet objectives in this area, realizing how one's performance is being and detecting possible areas for improvement in it is essential in this area.

Psychology

Psychology was one of the first areas to adopt self-assessment methods, as these allow patients to examine their own personality or mental characteristics.

In this area, it is something fundamental, since a professional psychologist often has to base his diagnoses on the information provided by his patients.

Instruments

Within the field of self-assessment, there are a large number of tools that can be used to measure the performance, characteristics or degree of learning of a person. Some of the most used are the following:

Self-reports

These are documents in which the person to be evaluated writes a series of data about himself that may be relevant to the process that is being carried out. They are generally used in areas such as health, psychology, and work life.

Standardized tests

The increasing number of tests of all kinds can allow a person to know themselves better, understand their own mental processes or evaluate their skills and difficulties. These tools can be used in practically all areas, being widely used in education and work.

Self-correction of tests

Finally, in some areas (especially education), self-assessment is carried out allowing the person to detect and correct the failures that they have had when carrying out an exam or test.

Advantages and disadvantages

Allows you to identify failures in your own performance

The main characteristic of self-assessment is that, when done correctly, it is the most objective way to check how a task is actually being carried out. This is because the person can see at all times where they are wrong, where their failures are, and in which areas they have to focus to improve.

This is very difficult to achieve through external evaluation, where it is necessary to use complex measurement tools to be able to have a basic idea about what an individual knows how to do or where they are making mistakes.

In this sense, the information obtained from an external evaluation process will always be incomplete compared to that collected through the self-evaluation.

It is complex to apply

If self-assessment provides such good results, why is it not used more in areas such as academics or work? The answer is that, despite its advantages, it can be extremely difficult to apply successfully.

This is mainly due to two problems: the need to be familiar with what you want to learn or do, and the difficulty in maintaining objectivity.

On the one hand, for a person to be able to self-evaluate their performance in a specific area, they must be very familiar with the correct way to act in it. Otherwise, it will be impossible for you to detect your mistakes, and therefore you will not be able to change your behavior to correct them.

For example, a student who has trouble with mathematics may have so little knowledge of this area that he is unable to even see where he is going wrong when solving an exercise. Due to this, she could not carry out a correct self-evaluation, nor correct her own errors through it.

In addition to this, self-assessment presents the extra problem that even if we know what we should be doing at all times or what is the correct way to act in a specific situation, maintaining objectivity when we are examining ourselves is extremely difficult.

Therefore, many self-assessment processes give unreliable results that do not help to improve the mistakes made.

Helps set realistic and useful goals

Despite the two problems already mentioned, self-assessment can be a very powerful tool in generating valid learning or performance objectives.

This is because, if the person is able to carry out the process correctly, they can identify very quickly in which areas they need to improve.

In addition, in an ideal situation, these goals will be based on the knowledge that the individual has about himself, which will help to make them more realistic, problem-centered and achievable. Thanks to this, the learning or acting process will improve more quickly.

Increase motivation

Finally, self-assessment has a series of characteristics that can cause the person to experience much higher levels of motivation than those that appear with other alternative systems. The most important are the measurement of the progress that is being made, and the feeling of control.

On the one hand, self-assessment can help a person see how they are progressing day after day in the area they are testing. Several studies have linked this to higher levels of satisfaction and motivation, because the goals are seen as more achievable and less intimidating.

In addition to this, examining one's own performance also returns part of the task control to the individual. When we are the only ones who are examining our performance, in addition to being the ones in charge of judging it, we generally feel more motivated to improve and try to do our best.

Application example

As we have already seen, one of the areas in which it is most common to find self-assessment processes is education. Thus, for example, many teachers choose to take "mock exams" before taking an actual test.

In these mock exams, students can discover which areas they need to focus on the most by looking objectively at exactly what mistakes they've made.

References

1. "Student Self - Assessment" in: Teaching Commons. Retrieved on: June 04, 2019 from Teaching Commons: teachingcommons.stanford.edu.
2. "Why You Should Use an Employee Self-Evaluation" in: The Balance Careers. Retrieved on: June 04, 2019 from The Balance Careers: thebalancecareers.com.
3. "Definition of self-assessment" in: Definition ABC. Retrieved on: June 04, 2019 from Definition ABC: definicionabc.com.
4. "5 ways to encourage best self - assessment practices among learners" in: Wabisabi Learning. Retrieved on: June 04, 2019 from Wabisabi Learning: wabisabilearning.com.
5. “Stimulate your students with these 10 creative self assessment ideas” in: Book Widgets. Retrieved on: June 04, 2019 from Book Widgets: bookwidgets.com.