The use of self-assessment in first year students of the degree of food science and technology

Resumen

In recent years, different authors and educational projects have highlighted the importance of the student´s self-assessment in the global evaluation of the learning progress. Self-assessment is a process, in which students carry out an assessment and analysis of their own work and learning progress. To get this, the university professors have to provide to students of the necessary tools for autonomous learning, so they are able to set their learning aims, self-asses and self-correction, having always the supervision of a professor.The aim of this work was to evaluate the usefulness of the self-assessment as an efficient tool to improve the autonomous learning of students in the first course of the Food Science and Technology Degree. The students have to elaborate a brief report and self-asses the work carried out with the help of a check list and a rubric. 43 students carried out the study.The results obtained showed that the check list and the self-assessment helped the students to reflect and make a critical judgment about their work, since 65% of the students gave grades to their works similar to those given by the professor. The remaining 35% gave grades significantly higher to those given by the professor. Furthermore, the students that make a correct analysis of their work obtained higher academic results than those that did not do a good reflection of the work carried out.Therefore, the results obtained in this work pointed out that the self-assessment is a useful tool to make some students aware of their learning progress; however, for a significant percentage of students, additional tools should be applied to improve their autonomous learning.