The instinct fallacy: the metacognition of answering and revising during college exams

Abstract

Students often gauge their performance before and after an exam, usually in the form of rough grade estimates or general feelings. Are these estimates accurate? Should they form the basis for decisions about study time, test-taking strategies, revisions, subject mastery, or even general competence? In two studies, undergraduates took a real multiple-choice exam, described their general beliefs and feelings, tracked their performance for each question, and noted any revisions or possible revisions. Beliefs formed after the exams were poor predictors of performance. In contrast, real-time metacognitive monitoring -measured by confidence ratings for each individual question -accurately predicted performance and were a much better decisional guide. Measuring metacognitive monitoring also allowed us to examine the process of revising an answer. Should a test-taker rely on their first choice or revise in the face of uncertainty? Experience seems to show that first instincts are correct. The decision-making literature calls this the first-instinct fallacy, based on extensive analysis of revisions, and recommends revising more. However, whereas revisions have been analyzed in great detail, previous studies did not analyze the efficacy of sticking with an original choice. We found that both revising and sticking resulted in significantly more correct than incorrect outcomes, with real-time metacognition predicting when each was most appropriate.Keywords Metacognition . Metamemory . Decision making . Exam revising . First-instinct fallacy When college students encounter an exam question that causes uncertainty, they recognize their uncertainty and use this metacognitive monitoring to control their behaviors. They might try to think about the question in a new way, decide to move on to another question, or seek out Metacognition Learning

The Nietzschean precedent for anti-reflective, dialogical agency

“…But clearly this is insufficient, because there is a method to overcome the defeater and the person would be held responsible for their choice whether they overcame the defeater or not. Couchman et al (2016) used a simple method of having examtakers keep track of their level of confidence in each answer, specifically to guard against the transience of memory and several of Tversky and Kahneman's (1974) heuristics. Confidence ratings are a common form of metacognitive assessment, and they found that these in-the-moment self-assessments were predictive of objective accuracy.…”

The participatory dimension of individual responsibility

“…But clearly this is insufficient, because there is a method to overcome the defeater and the person would be held responsible for their choice whether they overcame the defeater or not. Couchman et al (2016) used a simple method of having examtakers keep track of their level of confidence in each answer, specifically to guard against the transience of memory and several of Tversky and Kahneman's (1974) heuristics. Confidence ratings are a common form of metacognitive assessment, and they found that these in-the-moment self-assessments were predictive of objective accuracy.…”

Metacognitive Monitoring in Test-taking Situations: A Cross-cultural Comparison of College Students

“…Although there has been extensive research on monitoring accuracy-that is, how closely judgments about ones' performance are to actual performance (Dunlosky & Metcalfe 2009, Koriat, 1997, 2011, 2012, only a few of these studies examined the accuracy of metacognitive judgments in estimating performance in testing-taking situations, and the reported findings are mixed (e.g., Couchman, Miller, Zmuda, Feather, & Schwartzmeyer, 2016;Nietfeld, Cao, & Osborne, 2005). Furthermore, what is currently known in the literature about monitoring accuracy comes mainly from studies conducted on students from Western countries, where overconfidence bias is relatively common among students and culture is traditionally conceptualized as individualistic (Bol & Hacker, 2012;Dunlosky & Rawson, 2012;Foster, Was, Dunlosky, & Isaacson, 2016;Rawson & Dunlosky, 2007).…”

“…Researchers have investigated monitoring accuracy for local and global metacognitive judgments in a classroom setting (e.g., Couchman et al, 2016;Nietfeld et al, 2005) as well as in the laboratory (e.g., Dunlosky, Rawson, & Middleton, 2005). Local metacognitive judgments are those made for each test item separately, and global metacognitive judgments are an overall estimate of how well one performed on the entire test.…”