Do Confidence Ratings Reactively Modify Children's Academic Assessment Performance? Negative Answer from a Three-Year...

Area of Science:

• Educational Psychology
• Cognitive Science
• Metacognition Research

Background:

• Metacognitive judgments, like confidence ratings (CRs), can enhance performance in decision-making and reasoning tasks.
• Previous research indicates a reactivity effect where CRs improve task performance, particularly for confident individuals.
• The impact of CRs on academic assessment performance in real educational settings remains underexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether making retrospective confidence ratings (CRs) reactively influences academic assessment performance in elementary school children.
• To examine this effect across two core subjects: Chinese Language and Mathematics.
• To determine if children's self-confidence moderates the potential reactivity effect of CRs.

Main Methods:

• A longitudinal study involving 795 fourth-grade students across six waves (half-year intervals).
• Participants were assigned to either a CR group (providing ratings) or a no-CR group (control).
• Standardized academic assessments in Chinese and Mathematics were administered, with CRs solicited from Wave 2 onwards. Multilevel regression analyses were employed.

Main Results:

• Bayesian evidence strongly supported the null hypothesis: making CRs did not significantly influence children's academic assessment performance in either subject.
• This lack of effect was consistent across average performance (Waves 2-6) and individual wave performance.
• Children's self-confidence did not moderate the influence of CRs on academic performance.

Conclusions:

• The study found no evidence of a reactivity effect of confidence ratings on elementary students' academic assessment performance.
• Unlike findings in other domains, CRs did not enhance or alter performance in standardized Chinese and Mathematics tests.
• Further research may explore contextual factors or alternative metacognitive strategies that could impact academic achievement in educational settings.