Why Students Fail to Accurately Assess Their Own Learning Keith B. Lyle, Ph.D. Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences Celebration of Teaching and Learning February 12, 2016

We struggle to assess our learning Suboptimal metacognition Our thoughts and knowledge about our thoughts and knowledge Learning cannot be directly monitored 2

We struggle to assess our learning Cf. hunger, tiredness To know if you’ve learned something, you have to try to apply the knowledge Students’ first attempt to apply knowledge is often on a high-stakes test 3

Students don’t initiate application Study is dominated by attempts to increase ease of processing Processing fluency Kornell & Bjork (2007) 4

Students don’t initiate application Koriat & Bjork (2005) 5

Students don’t initiate application The association between learning and ease is exemplified by the meshing hypothesis We (putatively) learn best when taught in the fashion we prefer “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing. If classification of students’ learning styles has practical utility, it remains to be demonstrated.” (Pashler et al., 2008) 6

Students don’t initiate application Students realize that having to apply their knowledge grants them insight into their learning Lyle & Crawford (2011) 7

Students take notes in a manner that undermines assessments of learning 8

Notetaking and assessing learning Some students attempt to transcribe lectures, or summarize readings, verbatim These notes may be of little value when studying, although presumably they increase perceptions of learning Mueller & Oppenheimer (2014) 9

Optimism and assessing learning Inaccurate assessment could imply under- or overestimating learning, but expect the latter 10

Optimism and assessing learning If not required to apply knowledge, students overestimate how much they possess 76% of students think they are above average in critical thinking skills Only 36% of students think the same about statistical knowledge 11

Optimism and assessing learning Staring at material increases perceptions of learning Karpicke (2009) 12

Optimism and assessing learning Lyle & Simpson (2014) 13

Optimism and assessing learning Overestimation may occur even when directly contradicted The accuracy of answers that subjects judged as completely correct was “only” 89% in one experiment and 80% in another Rawson et al. (2013) 14

Are we part of the solution… …or part of the problem? Do we provide sufficient direction on what to study? Do we provide students with opportunities to assess learning—by doing—before the big test? How similar are those opportunities to the test itself? Students may learn that they can do X, when they need to learn that they can do Y 15

Learning is highly specific We often wish that learning were abstract and hence transferable and flexible Rawson et al. (2013) 16

Assessment following application Assessments of learning may be inaccurate even following successful application of knowledge Students do not appreciate how fleeting the ability to apply can be Kornell & Bjork (2007) 17

Assessment following application Information that is retrieved once may be irretrievable later Karpicke (2009) 18

Assessment following application Study that produces durable learning does not “feel” different than study that produces more fleeting learning 80% of subjects thought massing produced better learning than spacing Kornell & Bjork (2008) 19

What to do Require application of knowledge Do so repeatedly Do so at spaced intervals Tell students: You don’t know if you’ve learned something until you can do something with it at a delay Lyle et al. (2015) 20