This work investigates how people make judgments about the content of their visual working memory (VWM). Some studies on long-term memory suggest that people base those metacognitive judgments on the outcome of a retrieval attempt. In contrast, Son and Metcalfe (2005) observed that people identify poorly remembered items immediately, presumably by…

Knowledge assessments in undergraduate mathematics education commonly evaluate response correctness to determine learner proficiency. However, simultaneous evaluation of learner metacognition more accurately assesses the multiple dimensions of knowledge and has been shown to increase assessment validity and reliability. Research into…

Background: The wisdom of crowds and collective decision-making are important tools for integrating information between individuals, which can exceed the capacity of individual judgments. They are based on different forms of information integration. The wisdom of crowds refers to the aggregation of many independent judgments without deliberation…

Restricting one's access to temptations (precommitment) facilitates the achievement of long-term goals. The sophisticated impulsiveness model of precommitment posits that impulsive agents who are aware that they are impulsive should show the strongest preference for precommitment. Empirically however, two central predictions of this theoretical…

In this study, we examined monitoring accuracy during in class-exams for Emirati, American and Cypriot college students. In experiment 1, 120 students made local, confidence-ratings for each multiple-choice question in a psychology exam and also estimated their performance at the end of the exam. In experiment 2, to investigate the effect of…

Confidence ratings (CR) are often used to evaluate the metacognitive processes that occur during reasoning and problem solving. Typically CR are elicited with the assumption that they do not affect participants' underlying cognitive processes. However, recent evidence suggests that eliciting CR can cause changes in cognitive performance. What is…

Confidence in our memories is influenced by many factors, including beliefs about the perceptibility or memorability of certain kinds of objects and events, as well as knowledge about our skill sets, habits, and experiences. Notoriously, our knowledge and beliefs about memory can lead us astray, causing us to be overly confident in eyewitness…

The purpose of this investigation was to explore the importance of different meta-comprehension aspects in students with intellectual disabilities, and to determine which one of them can best explain their performance on reading comprehension. For this purpose, metacognitive measurement instruments, an inconsistency detection tasks, and confidence…

One of the key feedback questions is "where to next?" and this article provides some directions as to where to next for research based on a review of the five articles in this special issue. The directions relate to the critical importance of calibration, the multidimensionality of calibration, the relation of calibration to self-regulation…

A single experiment is reported in which introductory psychology students were administered a multiple-choice test on psychology with either 4 (n = 78) or 5 alternatives (n = 92) prior to any lectures being delivered. Two answers were generated for each question: a small answer consisting of their favorite alternative, and a large answer…

We introduce a specific type of item for knowledge tests, confidence-weighted true-false (CTF) items, and review experiences of its application in psychology courses. A CTF item is a statement about the learning content to which students respond whether the statement is true or false, and they rate their confidence level. Previous studies using…

This study explored students' ability to evaluate their learning from a multimedia inquiry unit about the causes of global climate change. Participants were 90 sixth grade students from four science classrooms. Students were provided with a text describing the causes of climate change as well as graphs showing average global temperature changes.…

The study investigated whether activation of inaccurate prior knowledge before study contributes to primary-school children's commission errors and overconfidence in these errors when learning new concepts. Findings indicate that inaccurate prior knowledge affects children's learning and calibration. The level of children's judgments of learning…

The ability to make realistic judgments of one's performance is a demonstration of the possession of strong metacognitive skills. In this study we investigate the relationship between accuracy of self-evaluation as an expression of metacognitive skill, and learning gain in stoichiometry. The context is an academic development programme at a South…

How do people monitor the correctness of their answers? A self-consistency model is proposed for the process underlying confidence judgments and their accuracy. In answering a 2-alternative question, participants are assumed to retrieve a sample of representations of the question and base their confidence on the consistency with which the chosen…