Why are children overconfident? Developmental differences in the implementation of accessibility cues when judging concept learning

Abstract

Children are often overconfident when monitoring their learning, which is harmful for effective control and learning. The current study investigated children's (N=167, age range 7-12years) judgments of learning (JOLs) when studying difficult concepts. The main aims were (a) to investigate how JOL accuracy is affected by accessibility cues and (b) to investigate developmental changes in implementing accessibility cues in JOLs. After studying different concepts, children were asked to generate novel sentences and then to make JOLs, select concepts for restudy, and take a final test. Overconfidence for incorrect and incomplete test responses was reduced for older children in comparison with younger children. For older age groups, generating a sentence led to greater overconfidence compared with not being able to generate a sentence, which indicates that older children relied more on accessibility cues when making JOLs. This pattern differed in the youngest age group; younger children were generally overconfident regardless of whether they had generated sentences or not. Overconfidence was disadvantageous for effective control of learning for all age groups. These findings imply that instructions to encourage children to avoid metacognitive illusions need to be adapted to children's developmental stage.

Category Learning in Schoolchildren. Its Relation to Age, Academic Marks and Resolution Patterns

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Effects of Feedback on Self‐Evaluations and Self‐Regulation in Elementary School

“…Besides experiencing more fluent processing, older children may also be more sensitive to the experiences and feelings they perceive when completing tasks than younger children are. Research by Van Loon, de Bruin, Leppink, and Roebers () shows that older elementary school children strongly rely on fluency experiences when making self‐evaluative judgments, whereas younger elementary school children may be less sensitive to these experiences. This may be a reason why the older children were even somewhat more overconfident for partially known information.…”

Associations amongst response inhibition, motivational beliefs, and task persistence in early elementary school

“…Although in the E-V model task persistence is conceptualized as a product of the interactions between expectancy and value, previous work indicates that young children are overly optimistic about their expectancy for success, reporting high perceived competence that is not related to their actual ability to complete the task (Jacobs et al, 2002;Muenks et al, 2018;Spinath & Spinath, 2005). Therefore, in early schooling, high perceived competence may instead be reflective of developmental changes in the cognitive control skills that support more accurate performance judgments (van Loon et al, 2017), further suggesting post-task assessment of perceived competence in this age range may be better for assessing factors of task persistence.…”