Recovering the foundational programme of student self-assessment: a response to Nieminen, Yan, and Boud (2025)

In a recent article in this journal, Nieminen, Yan and Boud propose positioning student agency at the centre of self-assessment design for the digital age. They characterise current practice as individualistic and oriented towards self-regulation, with the ‘self’ left at the margins. We share their interest in agency. We read their reframing, however, as doing something further, through framing rather than explicit claim: it relocates the empirical programme of self-assessment, including our own work, to the status of a tradition the field has moved past. We respond to that effect, and defend the programme it displaces, on empirical grounds. The ‘individualistic’ label does not fit a foundational programme that includes Boud’s own work. Their paper relies on established calibration research while directing attention away from the accuracy research to which the concept belongs, creating an asymmetry between what is prescribed and what is used. Its interpretation of recent meta-analyses does not reflect what those analyses showed. Further, the tradition being set aside contains some of the field’s most methodologically innovative work. Self-assessment advances through engagement with practice and evidence; in our view, the digital and agentic turns are best pursued in continuity with this programme, not as a break from it.