Great Myths of Education and Learning

Jeffrey D. Holmes

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781118760482
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Éducation en psychologie

Great Myths of Education and Learning reviews the scientific research on a number of widely-held misconceptions pertaining to learning and education, including misconceptions regarding student characteristics, how students learn, and the validity of various methods of assessment.

• A collection of the most important and influential education myths in one book, with in-depth examinations of each topic
• Focusing on research evidence regarding how people learn and how we can know if learning has taken place, the book provides a highly comprehensive review of the evidence contradicting each belief
• Topics covered include student characteristics related to learning, views of how the learning process works, and issues related to teaching techniques and testing

1
MYTH: STUDENTS ARE ACCURATE JUDGES OF HOW MUCH THEY KNOW

Most teachers have probably had the experience of asking students whether they have any questions on a particular topic and receiving confirmation from the students that they understand the material, only to learn from later exam results that this was not the case. Sometimes students may be too shy or anxious to speak up, but often they genuinely believe that they know more than they do. Students often express a great deal of confidence in the degree to which they have learned something (e.g., Shaughnessy, 1979; Sinkavich, 1995). However, students’ evaluations of their own learning can be extraordinarily inaccurate. Bjork, Dunlosky, and Kornell (2013) assert that students’ overconfidence arises because they misinterpret information about their learning and have inaccurate views about what learning strategies are most effective. It is therefore possible for students to be confident that they know something without actually knowing it. One team of researchers even found that students’ predictions regarding how well they would remember information they had studied were negatively correlated with their actual memory (Benjamin, Bjork, & Schwartz, 1998). That is, students had poorer memory for information they were more confident they would remember than for information about which they were less confident. Students’ ability to accurately assess their own knowledge has enormous implications for their capacity to select appropriate study strategies, effectively allocate their study time, and know when they have reached an appropriate level of mastery (Nelson & Dunlosky, 1991; Bjork et al., 2013).

Researchers have used two types of studies to test the accuracy of students’ estimates of their own knowledge pertaining to academic information. In some studies, students judge their own performance relative to a given standard by estimating how well they did on an exam or how many items they answered correctly. In other studies, students judge their knowledge or performance relative to other students. As demonstrated by the research results reported below based on both types of studies, students’ judgments of their own learning are often quite inconsistent with objective measures of that learning. However, the accuracy of self-judgments of learning is not consistent across students. Specifically, high-performing students are much more accurate than low-performing students in judging their own knowledge. Moreover, high-performers tend to underestimate their own performance, whereas low-performing students tend to exhibit overconfidence in their performance.

In one illustrative study (Langendyk, 2006), advanced medical students in Australia completed an assignment requiring them to make a complex diagnostic assessment. The assignments were then evaluated according to specific criteria by the students themselves, by student peers, and by faculty. Low-achieving students tended to give themselves and their peers higher ratings than those provided by faculty, but high-achieving students gave themselves lower ratings than those provided by faculty. According to Langendyk, students who were low achievers with respect to the assignment were simply “unable to assess accurately the quality of their own work” (p. 173). Because the students in this study were advanced medical students, most of them performed adequately in an absolute sense; however, the study shows that even academically advanced graduate students do not always have insight into their own performance and are sometimes unable to distinguish high-quality from low-quality work. The low-achieving students were unable to accurately judge the quality of their own performance or the performance of higher-achieving peers.

The tendency for lower academic performers to have difficulty judging the quality of their own performance has more frequently been the subject of research involving undergraduate students. Shaughnessy (1979) studied introductory psychology students as they completed four multiple-choice exams over the course of a semester. As students responded to each exam item, they also rated their degree of confidence that their answer was correct. For the first three exams, students later studied their answers and their confidence judgments; therefore, they received feedback both on their test performance and the accuracy of their judgments. Shaughnessy reported that students’ self-judgment accuracy was positively correlated with test performance. That is, students who knew more information were much more capable of evaluating how much they knew.

Similarly, Sinkavich (1995) assessed students’ confidence in their responses on multiple choice exams. Students rated their confidence in their responses and later received individualized feedback, compared their feedback with that of other students, and received encouragement to try to improve their ability to identify what they did and did not know. Consistent with earlier findings, and despite repeated individualized feedback, students who did well on the exams (those in the top third of the class in terms of exam score) judged their level of performance much more accurately than did poor performers (those in the bottom third of the class). In a more recent study (Ehrlinger, Johnson, Banner, Dunning, & Kruger, 2008), college students completed a difficult exam in class and then rated their performance immediately afterward. Students in the bottom quartile in terms of exam performance rated their performance at the 61st percentile, and their estimates of their own raw scores were inflated by an average of 20%. In contrast, those in the top quartile were more accurate, but tended to underestimate their performance both in terms of test score and standing relative to other students.

In a more complex classroom study (Hacker, Bol, Horgan, & Rakow, 2000), researchers again had undergraduates estimate their exam performance – this time both before and after taking exams. Immediately prior to taking an exam, students estimated the proportion of items they expected to get correct. Immediately following the exam, students reported the proportion of items they believed they had answered correctly. This procedure was repeated twice as the semester progressed. Throughout the course, the instructor emphasized the importance of accurate self-assessment and provided instruction on how to accomplish it. The week before each exam, students also completed practice tests on which they received feedback. The researchers replicated the results of other studies and provided even greater detail: students earning As and Bs were most accurate in their judgments; students earning Cs and Ds were highly overconfident in their predictions before the exam, but were much more accurate in their self-judgments after they had completed exams; and students whose exam scores were below 50% were grossly overconfident in their self-judgments both before and after taking the exams. Students in this lowest-performing category overestimated their actual exam performance by as much as 31 percentage points, and the lower their exam scores, the greater their overconfidence.

Laboratory studies of student self-knowledge provide additional insight into the findings from classroom research cited above. Kruger and Dunning’s (1999) research allowed them to evaluate student self-knowledge in a more controlled environment than that of a conventional classroom. In one of their studies, college students completed a logical reasoning test. The students then estimated the number of items they had answered correctly and reported how they believed they had performed relative to other students. Similar to classroom studies, students in the bottom quartile of test performance greatly overestimated their performance on the test itself as well as their performance relative to others. Not only did these low-performing students overestimate their performance, they also estimated their performance as above average: on average rating their performance at the 62nd percentile when it was actually at the 11th. Again mirroring classroom studies, students in the top quartile were more accurate and tended to underestimate their performance. Kruger and Dunning reported similar findings with respect to grammatical skills. Students in the bottom quartile of performance on a grammar test grossly overestimated their performance – rating themselves at the 61st percentile when their performance fell at the 10th percentile. Students in the second and third quartiles also overestimated their performance, but were more accurate than the lowest-performing students. Only students in the top quartile were accurate in their estimates of their absolute test performance, but, again, they tended to underestimate their performance relative to other students.

It is interesting to note that judgments of students’ own knowledge and performance – particularly among the majority of students whose performance is at or below the level that would earn them a B according to conventional grading standards – tend to be quite inaccurate whether the students predict their performance before or after taking an exam. Kruger and Dunning (1999) explained the inaccuracy of self-judgments, in particular those made by low performers, by asserting that “incompetence … not only causes poor performance but also the inability to recognize that one’s performance is poor” (p. 1130). To illustrate, they cited the ability to write grammatically correct sentences which, they observed, requires the same skills necessary to recognize grammatical errors. In other words, someone who is incapable of good writing will be unable to recognize and correct bad writing. Dunning and his colleagues referred to this as a “double curse” because “in many intellectual and social domains, the skills needed to produce correct responses are virtually identical to those needed to evaluate the accuracy of one’s responses” (Dunning, Johnson, Ehrlinger, & Kruger, 2003: 84–85). Skill or knowledge deficits prevent students from knowing whether their answers are correct, and also from recognizing that other students’ performance is superior.

High-performing students sometimes misjudge their own performance, but to a lesser degree. Moreover, high performers tend to underestimate their performance – at least relative to that of other students. Dunning (2005) explained that strong students underestimate the uniqueness of their performance. Because they are more knowledgeable, they are better able to accurately evaluate the quality of their work. Therefore their self-evaluations tend to be more accurate than those of low-performing students with respect to the proportion of test items answered correctly. Because they are more knowledgeable, they are likewise better at recognizing when they do not know something. However, strong students often make the false assumption that because they know something, most other students must know it as well. This leads them to overestimate the performance of other students (Ehrlinger et al., 2008).

Yet another factor contributing to students’ difficulty in making accurate judgments of their own knowledge is hindsight bias: the tendency to assume once something happens that one knew all along that it was going to happen (Fischhoff, 1975; see also Hawkins & Hastie, 1990, for a review). When students receive feedback suggesting that their knowledge is incomplete, such as getting an exam item incorrect, they may respond by telling themselves that they actually did know the information. Although they do not have a strong grasp of the material, they feel as if they do because they recognize something about the item content. Looking back, once they know the answer, the solution seems obvious. This feeling of familiarity can lead students to have an exaggerated sense of what they know. Hindsight bias therefore reinforces the feeling that their failure was due to the nature of the assessment rather than the nature of their knowledge – which makes it more difficult for them to learn from feedback.

Koriat and Bjork (2005) postulated a contrasting phenomenon that they termed foresight bias, which leads people to overestimate how well they will recall information when they predict their future performance at a time when the information to be learned is available to...