Improving students’ self-evaluation of learning for key concepts in textbook materials

Why do students have difficulties judging the correctness of information they recall (e.g., definitions of key concepts in textbooks), and how can students improve their judgement accuracy? To answer these questions, we had college students read six expository passages, each including four key terms with definitions. After reading a text, each key term was presented, and participants (a) attempted to recall the corresponding definition and (b) self-scored the correctness of the response (incorrect, partially correct, or entirely correct). Participants were overconfident, with inflated judgements for responses that were objectively incorrect. When participants could inspect correct definitions while judging their responses, judgement accuracy improved. Counterintuitively, however, some overconfidence remained. We discuss implications of these results for theory, education, and the two questions posed above.