Moderating Factors in University Students’ Self-Evaluation for Sustainability

Background: Self-evaluation is a multidimensional construct that has raised increasing interest within educational research at different educational stages. Different studies have pointed out the important role that Student Self-Assessment plays in improving student learning and ensuring the sustainability in instructional and evaluation processes. Method: The aim of this study with 630 university students is to analyze how engagement profiles and study strategies (measured by questionnaire) can predict the accuracy of students’ self-assessment of their achievements. For this purpose, the UWE-9 questionnaire was used to evaluate engagement, the Study Techniques Questionnaire scale to measure study strategies and a content-based test to evaluate performance, along with a self-assessment test in which the student had to estimate the level of achievement obtained in the content-based test, once the test had been completed. Results: The results show that both the academic engagement and the study strategies undertaken by students can be important factors that may influence different aspects of learning in the educational context. Students with higher performance and more engagement tend to show greater skills with student self-assessment (SSA) and students with better study habits tend to have better scores, greater confidence in the SSAs delivered and better skills for self-assessment. Conclusions: Findings suggests that providing opportunities for students to have a greater involvement in the construction of their learning and in its evaluation raises positive attitudes, which results in increased performance in order to achieve greater sustainability in the learning process assessment.