Examining underconfidence among high-performing students: A test of the false consensus hypothesis.

Abstract

People are inaccurate when predicting their performance on tests: Poor performers are often overconfident whereas high performers are slightly underconfident. This pattern is said to occur because low performers overestimate their own knowledge and underestimate others' knowledge, whereas high performers only overestimate others' knowledge by assuming it is similar to theirs-a false consensus effect. The current studies tested this false consensus hypothesis in a classroom setting. Across two studies spanning four classroom exams, students predicted the grade they would receive, their percentile rank, and the class average prior to taking an exam. Results showed that, although low performers made less accurate grade predictions than high performers, the groups did not differ in the accuracy of their percentile predictions or in their judgments of others' abilities. These findings failed to support the false consensus hypothesis that high performers make underconfident assessments of their relative standing due to overestimating others' knowledge.

Low-Performing Students Confidently Overpredict Their Grade Performance throughout the Semester

“…Thus, these findings are consistent with the hypothesis that low-performing students continue to inaccurately monitor their metacognition despite prior evidence to the contrary, thus failing to learn from previous test experiences. Future studies might explore whether providing students with more explicit feedback might influence their second-order judgments (e.g., Tirso et al 2019). For now, the finding that SOJs remained stable seems to suggest that students are steadfast in their prediction confidence.…”

“…using a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 to 5. We expected that exam predictions would remain high across tests during the semester and that this would be the case, particularly for the lowest-performing students, replicating prior work (Miller and Geraci 2011b;Tirso et al 2019). Of interest was what would happen for the second-order judgments (SOJs) for these students.…”

“…Students who perform the worst on an exam tend to significantly overpredict their performance, often by a few letter grades, whereas students who perform the best on the same exam tend to underpredict performance (Miller and Geraci 2011a). Research shows that students' calibration often remains poor across multiple tests throughout a semester (e.g., Foster et al 2017;Tirso et al 2019). So, the question of interest is: Why do students overpredict their performance in the face of feedback and experience?…”

Exploring the use of metacognitive monitoring cues following a diagram completion intervention

“…Good performers are known to have better metacognitive awareness compared to poor performers. At times, their metacognitive awareness might not be convincingly enough to judge them correct but, prompting them to lower their level of confidence (Tirso et al, 2019).…”

Metacognitive errors in the classroom: The role of variability of past performance on exam prediction accuracy

“…When this happens, they are said to have poor metacognitive monitoring, which is defined as the ability to accurately assess one's knowledge. The general pattern of results shows that the lowest performers on the task are generally overconfident in their performance compared to the highest performers on the task, who are sometimes underconfident in their performance (Al-Harthy et al, 2015;de Bruin et al, 2017;Dunning et al, 2003;Foster et al, 2017;Hacker et al, 2000Hacker et al, , 2008Händel & Fritzsche, 2016;Miller & Geraci, 2011;Saenz et al, 2017;Serra & DeMarree, 2016;Tirso & Geraci, 2020;Tirso et al, 2019). In terms of magnitude of these errors, the lowest performers are more poorly calibrated than the highest performers, as there is a larger difference between low performers' performance predictions and their actual performance than there is between high performers' performance predictions and their performance.…”