People remember their past performance, and predict their future performance, more positively when learning easier...

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Educational Psychology

Background:

• Beginners often exhibit overconfidence in their newly acquired skills.
• This overconfidence may stem from relying on initial fluency experiences.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if early experiences of fluency influence beginners' self-assessment and future predictions.
• To explore the impact of learning order on metacognitive judgments in skill acquisition.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments were conducted with three phases each.
• Participants translated Japanese kanji, ordered by visual similarity to their meaning (easy to hard) or vice versa.
• Self-performance ratings and future skill predictions were collected.

Main Results:

• Participants who translated easier kanji first reported higher performance.
• This group also exhibited greater confidence in future kanji-related tasks.
• The order of learning significantly affected metacognitive judgments.

Conclusions:

• Early fluency, particularly with easier tasks, can lead to inflated self-confidence in beginners.
• Metacognitive judgments are susceptible to the order in which information is presented.
• Findings have implications for instructional design and teaching methods for new skills.