Unskilled and unaware in the classroom: College students' desired grades predict their biased grade predictions.
People tend to be overconfident when predicting their performance on a variety of physical and mental tasks (i.e., they predict they will perform better than they actually do). Such a pattern is commonly found in educational settings, in which many students greatly overestimate how well they will pe...
| Published in: | Memory & Cognition Vol. 44; no. 7; pp. 1127 - 1138 |
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| Main Authors: | , |
| Format: | Article |
| Published: |
Springer Nature
Oct2016
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=118222617&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ssf uiTerm: 118222617 longDbName: Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson) uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 0090502X MEG jtl: Memory & Cognition issn: 0090502X maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Oct2016 vid: 44 iid: 7 pid: 237 pub: Springer Nature artinfo: ui: 118222617 10.3758/s13421-016-0624-9 ppf: 1127 ppct: 11 formats: fmt: @attributes: type: P size: 534KB tig: atl: Unskilled and unaware in the classroom: College students' desired grades predict their biased grade predictions. aug: au: Serra, Michael DeMarree, Kenneth affil: Department of Psychological Sciences , Texas Tech University , MS 2051, Psychology Building Lubbock 79409-2051 USA Department of Psychology , University at Buffalo, State University of New York , Buffalo USA su: Academic achievement Cognition College students Confidence Student attitudes Psychology sug: subj: Academic achievement Cognition College students Confidence Student attitudes Psychology keyword: Metacognition Overconfidence Predictions of performance Unskilled and unaware Wishful thinking Metacognition Overconfidence Predictions of performance Unskilled and unaware Wishful thinking ab: People tend to be overconfident when predicting their performance on a variety of physical and mental tasks (i.e., they predict they will perform better than they actually do). Such a pattern is commonly found in educational settings, in which many students greatly overestimate how well they will perform on exams. In particular, the lowest-performing students tend to show the greatest overconfidence (i.e., the 'unskilled-and-unaware' effect). Such overconfidence can have deleterious effects on the efficacy of students' short-term study behaviors (i.e., underpreparing for exams) and long-term academic decisions (i.e., changing one's academic major to an 'easier' topic or dropping out of school completely). To help understand why students' grade predictions are often overconfident, we examined the hypothesis that students' grade predictions are biased by their desired levels of performance, which are often much higher than their actual levels of performance. Across three studies in which actual students made predictions about their exam performance in their courses, we demonstrated that students' grade predictions are highly biased by their desired grades on those exams. We obtained this result when students predicted their exam grades over a week before the exam (Study 1), immediately after taking the exam (Study 2), and across the four course exams in a single semester (Study 3). These results are informative for understanding why the 'unskilled-and-unaware' pattern of performance predictions occurs, and why people in general tend to be overconfident when making both physical and mental performance predictions. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: N holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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