Learning to calibrate: Providing standards to improve calibration accuracy for different performance levels

Abstract

SummaryThis experimental study explores whether feedback in the form of standards helps students in giving more accurate performance estimates not only on current tasks but also on new, similar tasks and whether performance level influences the effect of standards. We provided 122 first‐year psychology students with seven texts that contained key terms. After reading each text, participants recalled the correct definitions of the key terms and estimated the quality of their recall. Half of the participants subsequently received standards and again estimated their own performance. Results showed that providing standards led to better calibration accuracy, both on current tasks and on new, similar tasks, when standards were not available yet. Furthermore, with or without standards, high performers calibrated better than low performers. However, results showed that especially low performers' calibration accuracy benefitted from receiving standards.

Improving calibration over texts by providing standards both with and without idea-units

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Calibrating Confidence: Civic Education and the Relationship between Objective Political Knowledge and Political Knowledge Confidence

“…This top left panel in figure 4 shows that the average absolute gap increases for students with the lowest objective knowledge at the beginning of the semester 19 . The increase in the average absolute gap for these students signals that many students in this group did not close the distance between the two dimensions of knowledge over the semester, which is similar to Nederhand, Tabbers, and Rikers’ finding that low knowledge students were the “worst” at calibration (2019, 1073). But this is likely due to their large growth in objective knowledge (see figure 3) leading many students to flip from being overconfident to underconfident.…”

Reflection on exam grades to improve calibration of secondary school students: a longitudinal study

“…Subsequently, studies have focused on how to improve calibration accuracy, but results have remained mixed. Furthermore, most of these results are hard to generalize to a secondary school context, as studies have been conducted in a university context (e.g, Callender et al, 2016;Dunlosky and Rawson, 2012;Hacker et al, 2000;Miller and Geraci, 2011b), or even in a laboratory setting (e.g., Finn and Tauber 2015;Metcalfe and Finn 2008;Nederhand et al 2019). Thus, the current study is one of the first to be able to provide specific guidelines as to how secondary schools may help students to become better calibrated.…”