Do they know what they know? Accuracy in teacher candidates' self‐assessments and its influencing factors

Abstract

Although self‐assessing one's knowledge is an integral part of a teacher's professional development, little is known about the accuracy of teacher candidates' self‐assessments. In particular, not much attention has been paid to their self‐assessment accuracy assessed on an individual level. Using measures from research on metacognition, we investigated the accuracy and bias of 513 mathematics teacher candidates who were tested in and self‐assessed their professional knowledge in the three core domains of mathematical content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge. In addition, we examined the consistency of self‐assessment accuracy across the three knowledge domains and its relation to personal characteristics such as cognitive ability, personality traits and occupational self‐efficacy. Results showed that in all three domains of professional knowledge, most teacher candidates were either over‐ or underconfident in their knowledge and unaware of their strengths and weaknesses. Cognitive ability reduced the risk of being overconfident, whereas self‐efficacy was predictive of overconfidence. The Big Five personality traits were not systematically connected to self‐assessment accuracy, and variance in self‐assessment accuracy is still to be explained by further research. We address shortcomings of measures that are commonly used in self‐assessment research and advocate for the use of metacognitive methods in future studies that focus on teacher self‐assessments.

Metacognition in mathematics education: From academic chronicle to future research scenario–A bibliometric analysis with the Scopus database

“…Some documents are disqualified due to various reasons, such as irrelevant topics including STEAM education (Gregg-Jolly et al, 2016;Griese et al, 2015), chemistry (Promentilla et al, 2016), physics (Phang, 2010), photography (Cappello & Lafferty, 2015), general metacognition instead of mathematics education (Moulin & Souchay, 2015;Roll et al, 2007;Wall, 2008), or review articles on non-metacognition topics (Baumanns & Rott, 2021). Some documents discussing the concepts of elf-regulatory and self-efficacy in learning without directly mentioning metacognition were secured for processing, such as Ernst et al (2023) and Jain and Dowson (2009). Some studies were restored after the research group discussion, such as the research on metacognition in multiple subjects, including mathematics by Guo (2020).…”

Analysing students' self‐assessment practice in a distance education environment: Student behaviour, accuracy, and task‐related characteristics

“…To appropriately serve its function, students' self-assessments need to be accurate (Ernst et al, 2023). Regarding RQ2, numerous students often exhibit a tendency to inaccurately evaluate their own abilities (Max et al, 2022).…”

“…Regarding RQ2, numerous students often exhibit a tendency to inaccurately evaluate their own abilities (Max et al, 2022). Ernst et al (2023) conducted a comprehensive literature review, revealing that students' relative accuracy remained notably low and exhibited a negative correlation with students' overconfidence. A parallel observation emerged from the study conducted by Chen and Zhang (2023), wherein participants who self-reported as 'highly accurate' in surveys predominantly achieved scores below the mean, while conversely, those who reported being 'not very accurate'…”