Unskilled and unaware in the classroom: College students’ desired grades predict their biased grade predictions

Mem Cogn (2016) 44:1127–1137 DOI 10.3758/s13421-016-0624-9 Unskilled and unaware in the classroom: College students’ desired grades predict their biased grade predictions Michael J. Serra 1 & Kenneth G. DeMarree 2 Published online: 6 June 2016 # Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2016 Abstract People tend to be overconfident when predicting their performance on a variety of physical and mental tasks (i.e., they predict they will perform better than they actually do). Such a pattern is commonly found in educational settings, in which many students greatly overestimate how well they will perform on exams. In particular, the lowest-performing students tend to show the greatest overconfidence (i.e., the Bunskilled-and-unaware^ effect). Such overconfidence can have deleterious effects on the efficacy of students’ shortterm study behaviors (i.e., underpreparing for exams) and long-term academic decisions (i.e., changing one’s academic major to an Beasier^ topic or dropping out of school completely). To help understand why students’ grade predictions are often overconfident, we examined the hypothesis that students’ grade predictions are biased by their desired levels of performance, which are often much higher than their actual levels of performance. Across three studies in which actual students made predictions about their exam performance in their courses, we demonstrated that students’ grade predictions are highly biased by their desired grades on those exams. We obtained this result when students predicted their exam grades over a week before the exam (Study 1), immediately after taking the exam (Study 2), and across the four course exams in a single semester (Study 3). These results are informative for understanding why the Bunskilled-and-unaware^ pattern of performance predictions occurs, and why people * Michael J. Serra in general tend to be overconfident when making both physical and mental performance predictions. Keywords Metacognition . Overconfidence . Unskilled and unaware . Wishful thinking . Predictions of performance Introduction People tend to be overconfident in their own abilities and in their future performance on a variety of tasks. For example, adults overestimate their skills and performance on tasks related to reasoning, humor, and grammar (Kruger & Dunning, 1999); children overestimate their ability to remember pictures (Lipko, Dunlosky, & Merriman, 2009) and to perform physical tasks (Schneider, 1998); and consumers overestimate how easy it will be to learn to use a new product (Billeter, Kalra, & Loewenstein, 2011). Most relevant to the present research, students often overestimate how well they will perform on an upcoming test of their learning (e.g., Hacker, Bol, & Bahbahani, 2008; Miller & Geraci, 2011a, b; but see Griffin, Jee, & Wiley, 2009; Shanks & Serra, 2014), which can impair their study behaviors (Metcalfe & Finn, 2008). The reasons for such overconfidence, however, are not yet well understood. Toward this end, in the present studies we tested the hypothesis that students make overconfident predictions of their test performance because their predictions are related to—and potentially biased by—their desired level of performance, which is typically higher than their actual level of performance. Persistent overconfidence 1 Department of Psychological Sciences, Texas Tech University, MS 2051, Psychology Building, Lubbock, TX 79409-2051, USA 2 Department of Psychology, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, USA Researchers in a variety of domains have examined people’s self-assessments of their own abilities and predictions of their own future performance for both mental and physical tasks. In 1128 the context of human learning within formal-education settings, people’s thoughts about their thoughts (i.e., metacognition; see Briñol & DeMarree, 2012; Dunlosky & Metcalfe, 2009) play a major role in determining the efficacy of students’ study behaviors. For example, students utilize metacognitive knowledge when selecting strategies for how to study, engage in metacognitive monitoring when evaluating how well they already know what they are studying, and engage metacognitive control when using their knowledge and monitoring to decide for how long to continue to study, or whether to stop studying altogether (i.e., Nelson & Narens, 1990; for a review, see Dunlosky & Metcalfe, 2009). Critically, flaws in any of these components of metacognition can impair students’ study behaviors (Serra & Metcalfe, 2009). In the present studies, we examined a common error in students’ monitoring of their learning and predictions of their future test performance: the persistent overconfidence of students’ judgments (e.g., Ehrlinger, Johnson, Banner, Dunning, & Kruger, 2008; Erev, Wallsten, & Budescu, 1994; Klayman, Soll, González-Vallejo, & Barlas, 1999; Koriat, Lichtenstein, & Fischhoff, 1980). Overconfidence in this regard (i.e., students’ predictions of their future test performance being significantly higher than their actual performance) can be problematic for students, because it can lead them to underprepare for exams (e.g., Bjork, Dunlosky, & Kornell, 2013; Dunlosky & Rawson, 2012; Grimes, 2002; Kornell & Bjork, 2008; Kornell & Metcalfe, 2006; but see Carpenter, Wilford, Kornell, & Mullaney, 2013) or make poor restudy decisions (cf. Finn, 2008; Metcalfe & Finn, 2008; Shanks & Serra, 2014). Unskilled and unaware Although it could prove problematic for any student to overestimate their learning (especially leading up to an exam), of further concern is the common observation that the lowestperforming (and, perhaps, lowest-ability) students are the ones most overconfident in their judgments, whereas the highestperforming students tend to be more accurate, or even demonstrate underconfidence (for a review, see Miller & Geraci, 2011b). This pattern is often referred to as Bunskilled and unaware,^ because it seems that the lowest-performing people in a domain not only lack the abilities or knowledge to perform well in that domain, but also lack metacognitive awareness of their deficits (e.g., Dunning, Johnson, Ehrlinger, & Kruger, 2003; Grimes, 2002; Kruger & Dunning, 1999; but see Griffin et al., 2009; Miller & Geraci, 2011b; Shanks & Serra, 2014). In formal-education settings, this pattern can be especially problematic. This pattern not only might lead the lowest-performing students to underprepare for exams within their courses, but also could suggest to these students that they Mem Cogn (2016) 44:1127–1137 are not capable of passing their courses, that they cannot achieve the level of performance they expected in those or other courses, and even that they are not at all capable of succeeding in that field of study (cf. Grimes, 2002). For example, Stinebrickner and Stinebrickner (2014) reported that students tend to change their major from a science to a nonscience field because their grades in their science courses were sub (...truncated)