Achievement goals affect metacognitive judgments.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Educational Psychology

Background:

• Metacognition, the awareness and control of one's own cognition, is crucial for effective learning.
• Achievement goals, such as mastery-approach and performance-approach, can significantly impact cognitive processes during learning.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the influence of distinct achievement goals on metacognitive judgments and actual learning performance.
• To determine if adopting mastery-approach versus performance-approach goals differentially affects learners' self-assessments and recall abilities.

Main Methods:

• Five experiments were conducted, manipulating participants' achievement goals to either mastery-approach or performance-approach.
• Metacognitive judgments, including judgments of learning (JOLs) and metacomprehension judgments, were assessed.
• Actual recall performance was measured using cued recall tasks and text passage tests.

Main Results:

• Participants in the performance-approach goal condition reported higher judgments of learning (JOLs) for word pairs compared to those in the mastery-approach goal condition.
• Metacomprehension judgments for text passages were also elevated in the performance-approach goal condition.
• No significant differences in cued recall performance or test performance were observed between the two achievement goal conditions.

Conclusions:

• Achievement motivation, specifically the type of goal adopted, can bias metacognitive judgments during the learning process.
• Learners pursuing performance-approach goals may overestimate their understanding, irrespective of their actual performance.
• These findings highlight a dissociation between metacognitive confidence and objective learning outcomes.