Using standards to improve middle school students' accuracy at evaluating the quality of their recall

When recalling key term definitions from class materials, students may recall entirely incorrect definitions, yet will often claim that these commission errors are entirely correct; that is, they are overconfident in the quality of their recall responses. We investigated whether this overconfidence could be reduced by providing various standards to middle school students as they evaluated their recall responses. Students studied key term definitions, attempted to recall each one, and then were asked to score the quality of their recall. In Experiment 1, they evaluated their recall responses by rating each response as fully correct, partially correct, or incorrect. Most important, as they evaluated a particular response, it was presented either alone (i.e., without a standard) or with the correct definition present. Providing this full-definition standard reduced overconfidence in commission errors: Students assigned full or partial credit to 73% of their commission errors when they received no standard, whereas they assigned credit to only 44% of these errors when receiving the full-definition standard. In Experiment 2, a new standard was introduced: Idea units from each definition were presented, and students indicated whether each idea unit was in their response. After making these idea-unit judgments, the students then evaluated the quality of their entire response. Idea-unit standards further reduced overconfidence. Thus, although middle school students are overconfident in evaluating the quality of their recall responses, using standards substantially reduces this overconfidence and promises to improve the efficacy of their self-regulated learning.