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Improving metacognition in the classroom through instruction, training, and feedback

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Abstract

Accurately judging one’s performance in the classroom can be challenging considering most students tend to be overconfident and overestimate their actual performance. The current work draws upon the metacognition and decision making literatures to examine improving metacognition in the classroom. Using historical data from several semesters of an upper-level undergraduate course (N = 127), we analyzed students’ judgments of their performance and their actual performance for two exams. Students were instructed on the concepts of overconfidence, received feedback on exams, and were given incentives for accurate calibration. We found results consistent with the “unskilled and unaware” effect Kruger & Dunning (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121–1134, 1999) where lower performing students initially displayed overconfidence and the highest performing students initially displayed underconfidence. Importantly, students were able to change both judgments and performance such that metacognitive accuracy improved significantly from the first to the second exam. In a second study, two additional semesters for the same course used in Study 1 were examined (N = 90). For one of the semesters feedback was not provided, allowing us to determine whether feedback can improve both metacognitive judgments and performance. Our findings revealed significant improvements in performance paired with decreases in overconfidence on Exam 2, but only for students who received feedback about their performance and judgments. We postulate that feedback may be an important component in improvement metacognitive judgments.

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Notes

  1. Because this was a historical data set spanning 5 semesters from Fall 2009 to Fall 2011 semesters and the classes were not taught with the objective of analyzing course performance and judgments, we only have gender as demographic data on the students and more detailed demographic information is not included in the class rosters provided to instructors.

  2. Because of the historical nature of the data set, item by item responses and some of the individual level data for exams’ content multiple choice versus other content is incomplete and therefore is not presented in the table.

  3. A range of −2 to 2 was chosen because it corresponded to the range of calibration that received the largest incentive.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, 36849, USA

    Aimee A. Callender, Ana M. Franco-Watkins & Andrew S. Roberts

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  1. Aimee A. Callender
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  2. Ana M. Franco-Watkins
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  3. Andrew S. Roberts
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Correspondence to Aimee A. Callender.

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Callender, A.A., Franco-Watkins, A.M. & Roberts, A.S. Improving metacognition in the classroom through instruction, training, and feedback. Metacognition Learning 11, 215–235 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11409-015-9142-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11409-015-9142-6

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