Overconfidence produces underachievement: Inaccurate self evaluations undermine students’ learning and retention

The function of accurately monitoring one’s own learning is to support effective control of study that enhances learning. Although this link between monitoring accuracy and learning is intuitively plausible and is assumed by general theories of self-regulated learning, it has not received a great deal of empirical scrutiny and no study to date has examined the link between monitoring accuracy and longer-term retention. Across two studies, college students paced their study of key-term definitions (e.g., “Proactive interference: Information already stored in memory interferes with the learning of new information”). After all definitions were studied, participants completed practice cued recall tests (e.g., “What is proactive interference?”) in which they attempted to type the correct definition for each term. After each test trial, participants judged how much of their response was correct. These study-test-judgment trials continued until a definition was judged as correct three times. A final cued recall test occurred two days later. In Study 1, judgment accuracy was manipulated experimentally, and in Study 2, individual differences in accuracy were examined. In both studies, greater accuracy was associated with higher levels of retention, and this link could not be explained by differential feedback, effort during study, or trials to criterion. Results indicate that many students could benefit from interventions aimed at improving their skill at judging their learning.     

Recommendations for exploring the disfluency hypothesis for establishing whether perceptually degrading materials impacts performance

The target articles explore a common hypothesis pertaining to whether perceptually degrading materials will improve reasoning, memory, and metamemory. Outcomes are mixed, yet some evidence was garnered in support of a version of the disfluency hypothesis that includes moderators, and along with evidence from prior research, researchers will likely continue to explore the impact of disfluency on reasoning and learning. Toward this end, evidence and discussion from the target articles also suggest recommendations – both explicitly and implicitly – about how to explore this effect: (a) treat disfluency as a hypothesis to be tested and evaluate the disfluency hypothesis against alternatives; (b) pursue multiple replications of any disfluency effects; (c) attempt to measure differences in processing fluency across conditions; and (d) resist labeling manipulated variables with theoretically-laden terms. We expand on these recommendations in the present commentary.     

Do Students Effectively Regulate Their Use of Self-Testing as a Function of Item Difficulty?

Educational Psychology Review - Retrieval practice is beneficial for both easy-to-learn and difficult-to-learn materials, but scant research has examined students’ use of self-testing for...     

Gender differences in confidence during number-line estimation

Metacognition and Learning - Prior research has found gender differences in spatial tasks in which men perform better, and are more confident, than women. Do gender differences also occur in...     

The Power of Successive Relearning: Improving Performance on Course Exams and Long-Term Retention

Practice tests and spaced study are both highly potent for enhancing learning and memory. Combining these two methods under the conditions in which they are most effective (i.e., practice tests that invoke successful retrieval from long-term memory and spacing study across days) yields a promising learning technique referred to as successive relearning. Given the obvious implications of successive relearning for promoting student learning and the voluminous literatures on testing and spacing more generally, surprisingly few studies have evaluated successive relearning, and none have done so in an authentic educational context. The two experiments reported here establish the potency of a successive relearning intervention for enhancing student learning by demonstrating meaningful improvements in course exam performance and on long-term retention tests.     

Even after thirteen class exams,students are still overconfident: the role of memory for past exam performance in student predictions

Students often are overconfident when they predict their performance on classroom examinations, and their accuracy often does not improve across exams. One contributor to overconfidence may be that students did not have enough experience, and another is that students may under-use their knowledge of prior exam performance to predict performance on their upcoming exams. To evaluate the former, we examined student prediction accuracy across 13 exams in an introductory course on educational psychology. For the latter, we computed measures that estimate the extent to which students use the prior exam score when predicting performance and whether students should use the prior exam scores. Several outcomes are noteworthy. First, students were overconfident, and contrary to expectations, this overconfidence did not decline across exams. Second, students’ prior exam scores were not related to subsequent predictions, even though prior exam performance showed little bias with respect to predicting future performance. Thus, students appear to under-use prior performance despite its utility for improving prediction accuracy about future exam performance.     

How is knowledge generated about memory encoding strategy effectiveness?

This study evaluated how people learn about encoding strategy effectiveness in an associative memory task. Individuals studied two lists of paired associates under instructions to use either a normatively effective strategy (interactive imagery) or a normatively ineffective strategy (rote repetition) for each pair. Questionnaire ratings of imagery effectiveness increased and ratings of repetition effectiveness decreased after task experience, demonstrating new knowledge about strategy effectiveness. Cued recall confidence judgments, measuring confidence in recall accuracy, were almost perfectly correlated with actual recall and strongly correlated with postdictions—estimates of recall for each strategy. A structural regression model revealed that postdictions mediated both changes in second-list predictions and changes in strategy effectiveness ratings, implicating accurate performance estimates based on item-level monitoring as the key to updating strategy knowledge.     

Error correction in text

Previous research has shown that writers and editors of all ages and abilities have trouble correcting errors in texts. In this study, we were interested in discovering whether people do not correct these errors mainly because (1) they do not have the knowledge to correct them, or because (2) even though they do have the knowledge to correct the errors, they do not use it. The first case would point to aknowledge deficit, or a deficit at the cognitive level; the second case would point to aprocessing deficit, or a deficit at the metacognitive level. The study compared the number and type of implanted errors corrected by high school and college subjects working on two different texts under three different conditions. We found that, for both ages, the biggest stumbling block in correcting errors was not the knowledge of how to correct them, but rather a failure to detect them: They did not use their available knowledge to find the errors. This processing deficit may be the result of a dearth of available error-finding strategies, or knowledge may not be activated because of lack of motivation or because of a failure to perceive the nature of the task.     

How Effective is Example Generation for Learning Declarative Concepts?

Declarative concepts (i.e., key terms and corresponding definitions for abstract concepts) represent foundational knowledge that students learn in many content domains. Thus, investigating techniques to enhance concept learning is of critical importance. Various theoretical accounts support the expectation that example generation will serve this purpose, but few studies have examined the efficacy of this technique. We conducted three experiments involving 487 undergraduates to investigate the effects of example generation on concept learning and examined factors that may moderate its effectiveness. Students read a short text that introduced eight concepts. Some students were then prompted to generate concrete examples of each concept followed by definition restudy, whereas others only restudied definitions for the same amount of time. Two days later, students completed final tests involving example generation and definition cued recall. Meta-analytic outcomes indicated that example generation yields moderate improvements in learning of declarative concepts, relative to restudy only. Each experiment also included additional groups to investigate potential moderators. Example generation tended to be more effective with spaced versus massed restudy. Despite strong correlations between the quality of examples generated during practice and final test performance, experimental manipulations that improved example quality did not improve learning. In sum, the current work establishes that example generation enhances concept learning and provides an important foundation for further investigating factors that moderate its benefits to learning.     

Beyond the Rainbow: Retrieval Practice Leads to Better Spelling than does Rainbow Writing

In three experiments, we compared the effectiveness of rainbow writing and retrieval practice, two common methods of spelling instruction. In experiment 1 (n?=?14), second graders completed 2 days of spelling practice, followed by spelling tests 1 day and 5 weeks later. A repeated measures analysis of variance demonstrated that spelling accuracy for words trained with retrieval practice was higher than for words trained with rainbow writing on both tests (η _p ² ?=?.49). In experiments 2 (second graders, n?=?16) and 3 (first graders, n?=?12), students completed 2 days of spelling practice followed by a spelling test 1 day later. Results replicated experiment 1; spelling accuracy was higher for words trained with retrieval practice compared with rainbow writing (η _p ² ?=?.42 and .64, respectively). Furthermore, students endorsed both liking and learning from retrieval practice at least as much as (and sometimes more than) rainbow writing. Results demonstrate that retrieval practice is a more useful (and as engaging) training method than is rainbow writing and extend the well-established testing effect to beginning spellers.