Metacognitive Miscalibration and Underachievement in a Computer Literacy Course: Some Preliminary Observations.

Metacognition, literally thinking about thinking, is a term used by cognitive psychologists to refer to our ability to monitor our own performance on cognitive tasks. The term also addresses the ability to assess level of knowledge and skill in a given domain. Behavioral and psychological researchers frequently solicit metacognitive judgments from research participants in the form of self-assessment survey items. However, evidence suggests that metacognitive judgments are often at odds with reality. The term metacognitive miscalibration is used to refer to this disparity between self-assessments and more objective measures of ability and performance. The authors have theorized a relationship between metacognitive miscalibration and underachievement in courses where many students enter the class believing they already know the material. This paper reports preliminary results from an ongoing study seeking to understand the relationship between metacognitive miscalibration and underachievement in a computer literacy course. Five figures include pretest quiz results, miscalibration and recalibration in the pretest, comparison of pretest and posttest quiz scores, comparison of improvement by recalibration group, and posttest quiz results. (Author)