Abstract
Student learning in introductory science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses is often self-regulated. For self-regulated learning to be effective, students need to engage in accurate metacognitive monitoring to make appropriate metacognitive control decisions. However, the accuracy with which individuals monitor their task performance appears to largely overlap with their ability to perform that task. This study examined the trajectories in the accuracy of students’ metacognitive monitoring over the course of a semester, along with the effect of monitoring accuracy feedback. The results indicate that some students improve the accuracy of their predictions over the course of a semester. However, low-performing students are less accurate at predicting their exam grades, and tend not to improve their metacognitive calibration over the course of a semester. In addition, providing low-performing students with calibration feedback may lead to greater overconfidence.
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Notes
A second reason was pragmatic given that course instructors did not want item-by-item local judgements used on the high-stakes exams for this course.
The Physics department generally aims to write exams that have a mean score between 70 and 75%. The second and final exams had lower means than desired by course instructors. While course instructors aim for a mean in this range, students are not made aware of this goal. Historically, the mean varies and may fall outside of this this desired range
The same conclusions are reached if only those who made predictions on all four exams are used in the analysis.
The same conclusions are reached if only those who made predictions on all four exams are used in the analysis.
The same conclusions are reached if only those who made predictions on all four exams are used in the analysis though the marginal interaction for exam 4 results in p = .10.
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Morphew, J.W. Changes in metacognitive monitoring accuracy in an introductory physics course. Metacognition Learning 16, 89–111 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11409-020-09239-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11409-020-09239-3