The effect of feedback on children’s metacognitive judgments: a heuristic account

Abstract

In three experiments, we investigated whether the feedback effect on the accuracy of children's metacognitive judgments results from an improvement in monitoring processes or the use of the Anchoring-and-Adjustment heuristic. Experiment 1 revealed that adding feedback increased the accuracy of young children's (aged 4, 6, and 8 years) memory prediction. In Experiment 2, the influence of an external anchor on children's metacognitive judgment was established. Finally, in Experiment 3, two memory tasks that differed in terms of difficulty were administered. Participants were randomly assigned to an anchoring (high/low/no anchor) and a feedback (feedback/no feedback) condition. Results demonstrated that children in the feedback condition adjusted their predictions toward the feedback, regardless of the task's difficulty. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that external information provided by feedback is used as an anchor for judgment. This interpretation is strengthened by the correlation found between the two scores computed to assess participants' susceptibility to anchoring and feedback effects, which indicates that children who are more sensitive to the anchoring effect are also more sensitive to the feedback effect.Keywords: Metacognition, Judgment, Feedback, Anchoring, Children Running head: Feedback effect in children 3The Effect of Feedback on Children's Metacognitive Judgments: A Heuristic AccountDecades of intensive studies on metacognition have established that how accurately people assess their memory determines how efficiently they regulate their learning (Dunlosky & Hertzog, 1998; Kornell & Bjork, 2007; Kornell & Metcalfe, 2006;T. O. Nelson & Narens, 1994;Son, 2010;Thiede, 1996). Usually, the ability to assess internal cognitive processes (i.e., metacognitive monitoring) is appraised by asking participants to judge the quality of their performance before (prospective judgment) or after (retrospective judgment) carrying out a cognitive task. These metacognitive judgments can be made on an item-by-item basis (local level) or for the task as a whole (global level). The accuracy of judgments can be assessed with calibration scores (Van Overschelde & Nelson, 2006). This type of score shows the degree to which the judgment differs from the actual level of performance.Children's metacognitive judgments are far from accurate. Many developmental studies have demonstrated that children regularly overestimate their memory performance when making metacognitive judgments (e.g., Kvavilashvili & Ford, 2014; Lipko, Dunlosky, Lipowski, & Merriman, 2012). Interestingly, this effect seems to be particularly pronounced when the accuracy of global prospective judgments is examined (Lipko, Dunlosky, & Merriman, 2009;Shin, Bjorklund, & Beck, 2007;Yussen & Levy, 1975). For instance, Shin et al. (2007) presented three groups of children (aged 6, 7, and 9 years old) with a set of pictures, then asked them to estimate how many items they thought they would be able to remember on a subsequent test (glob...

Anchoring effect of performance feedback on accuracy of metacognitive monitoring in preschool children

“…In Experiment 2 the children solved reasoning task involving patterns of objects. Similarly as in Experiment 1 the preschool children made significantly more accurate predictions about their future performance after receiving perform ance feedback (Geurten & Meulemans, 2017). Performance feedback also had an effect on uncertainty monitoring, with children who received feedback after an incorrect answer lowering their future expectations.…”

“…Research by Schneider (1998) shows that children's judgments have higher metacognitive accuracy when they are doing familiar tasks, because they can relate to their previous experience. However, in the research on feedback effect there are often used unfamiliar tasks to ensure the results are unbiased (Geurten & Meulemans, 2017;Urban & Urban, 2019;van Loon et al, 2017). As Winne (2011) pointed out students perform better on unfamiliar tasks when the overall evaluation standards are set externally by the teachers (Hamilton, 1985;Kiewra, Benton, Kim, Risch, & Christensen, 1995), but once students gain experience of the subject they can begin to use task familiarity as an internal cue on their own (Begg, Anas, & Farinacci, 1992).…”

“…In order to improve the accuracy of predictive and postdictive judgments in preschool age, researchers examined the effect of performance feedback ( Destan, Spiess, de Bruin, van Loon, & Roebers, 2017 ; Lipowski, Merriman, & Dunlosky, 2013 ; Urban & Urban, 2018 , 2020 ; van Loon, Destan, Spiess, de Bruin, & Roebers, 2017 ). Receiving performance feedback can improve metacognitive accuracy in preschoolers’ postdictions ( Urban & Urban, 2018 , 2020 ) and predictions ( Lipowski et al, 2013 ) from the age of 4 ( Geurten & Meulemans, 2017 ). To answer the question of why feedback has an effect on preschool children, Geurten and Meulemans (2017) decided to test the anchoring effect of feedback on the predictive judgments of children aged 4, 6 and 8 years old in memory tasks.…”

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

“…One possibility is that students became skilled in evaluating their own answer, because comparing previous answers to standards taught them to what aspects in their own recall they should pay attention to, leading to better cue use. It is also possible that students simply started anchoring their estimate of subsequent texts on their performance of a previous text, which may be an ineffective strategy when text difficulty varies (Geurten & Meulemans, 2017).…”

Metacognition for strategy selection during arithmetic problem-solving in young and older adults

“…Moreover, some data show that prospective judgments are more likely based on recent history of performance and, thus, can be biased when the level of difficulty of a task varies from one item to the next (e.g., Fleming et al, 2016;Geurten & Meulemans, 2017).…”