Confidence, under-confidence, overconfidence:
What do they tell us about learning?
Anastasia Efklides
Professor emerita
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Introduction
•
One of the main goals of education is to support students’ learning and achievement, and at the same time promote student well-
being.
•
Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) is crucial for the attainment of this goal.
•
SRL means that the students are responsible for their learning, have autonomy, enjoy learning because they are interested in it, and
regulate their learning so as to attain their learning goals.
Introduction
•In this presentation I will try to show that confidence is essential for SRL.
•Its contribution to SRL is through relatively stable person characteristics such as
-self-confidence (i.e., I am confident I am good in what I am doing) -self-efficacy beliefs (i.e., I can bring about a desired outcome).
Also, through
-feelings of confidence as one works on a task. These are
metacognitive feelings that inform students about the correctness of their own response (e.g., I am sure my response is correct).
Introduction
Feelings of confidence offer self-awareness about
-one’s thinking and learning (i.e., whether the way I solve a problem is correct), and
-the state of one’s motivation (i.e., self-efficacy). High confidence informs that “I can do the task, and hence, I will engage in learning activities”
They also trigger
-control decisions, that is, use of strategies to overcome lack of knowledge or correct errors, and
-emotions (e.g., pride, shame, curiosity) that facilitate activities related to learning.
Introduction
However, confidence, as person characteristic or feeling, is not always accurate and may lead to over- or under-confidence in relation to one’s performance.
This is a challenge for educators who come across situations in the
classroom in which confidence needs to be enhanced or moderated for SRL to be effective.
Examples of situations
involving student confidence
• 1. A teacher gives a test to his students. When they finish writing he asks them how confident they are that their response was correct.
• A student who gave a totally incorrect response says he is 100% sure his response is correct. The teacher asks him to think again and correct his response if needed. The student gives a new answer and declares he is 100% confident it is correct
(hypercorrection).
• In the same situation one of the good students is quite concerned. She says the response is probably correct but she is not so sure, because she had difficulty to figure out the answer.
• Another student gives a correct answer but the teacher says it is not correct. The student says “No, I am sure it is correct. I will not change it”
Examples
• 2. The parents of a young child are very attentive, supportive and praise the child when she succeeds. The child persists, tries again and again and, finally, succeeds.
She grows with the sense that she can do things (self-efficacy), is sure about herself (self-confidence) and enjoys learning.
Examples
• 3. A teacher of 1st grade at the beginning of the school year gives the highest mark when her students complete their assignments, despite possible errors in spelling. The students are very confident that they are doing well.
After some time the teacher changes the marking scheme and gives the highest mark only when spelling is also correct. Students get confused, frustrated, and their confidence drops.
Gradually, they realize the code of the teacher’s marking and try to comply.
They succeed, feel happy, and their confidence is restored, because they make progress.
Examples
• 4. The students know that a significant test is imminent.
• They check the material they have to study and make a judgment that it is easy to learn.
• They feel confident that they will do well on the test.
• They decide to give priority to the study of another test that is more difficult and leave the easy one for later.
Sources of confidence feelings
Factors that influence confidence feelings are the following:
-The correctness of response itself
-The fluency (disfluency) in response production (e.g., feeling of difficulty)
-Prior performance on similar tasks -Prior knowledge in a domain
-Self-concept and self-efficacy
-Explicit or implicit criteria for judging the correctness of a response -Corrective feedback
Calibration of confidence feelings
• Feelings of confidence change through calibration.
Calibration regards the alignment of feeling of confidence with performance
• There are two forms of calibration:
• Relationship of confidence feelings with overall performance
• Relationship of confidence with performance on individual test items.
This allows the differentiation of effort depending on how well the
Over- and under-confidence
Calibration Performance Confidence
Accurate Correct High
Under-confidence Correct Low
Overconfidence Incorrect High
Accurate Incorrect Low
Overconfidence
• Overconfidence is evidenced when the student judges their performance as more correct than it actually is.
• A certain degree of overconfidence is desirable when performance is partly correct, because it facilitates
engagement, positive affect and expectations of success, effort exertion, and persistence.
• Low performance associated with high overconfidence is problematic because the student is not aware that she lacks
Overconfidence
In general, students with high confidence, self-efficacy, and interest,
despite low prior understanding of scientific concepts and high degree of misconceptions, are most productive in conceptual change.
The opposite is true for students with low confidence, low interest and many misconceptions.
Low performing students are usually more overconfident than high performing students.
Nevertheless, they are still aware that they are not doing so well.
Because of this, they quit effort prematurely, with negative effects for their learning.
Under-confidence
• High performance associated with under-confidence makes the
student cautious, more analytic in task processing, and more willing to persist in learning.
• Low performance associated with under-confidence (i.e., the student is aware of low performance and judges it even lower that it actually is) leads to low expectations, disengagement, and low effort exertion.
• In such a case low expectations of success and low perceived control
Teachers and student confidence
• Teachers’ primary goal is to cultivate students’ content knowledge and skills in the various subject domains.
To do this they need to
-provide conceptual knowledge and corrective feedback
-foster student motivation such as self-confidence and self- efficacy -promote positive affect such as interest, curiosity, surprise as
well as pride for student achievements.
• A warm classroom environment and
teacher self-confidence in their knowledge and teaching skills are crucial for students’ learning and development of self-efficacy
Teachers and student confidence
• Teachers also need to support students to self-regulate their learning.
One way to do this is to cultivate students’ accuracy of self-monitoring (see Gidalevich & Kramarski, 2017) by asking themselves questions such as:
“What” Did I understand the problem? What is similar/different?
“Why” What is the strategy to use? Why?
“How”. Can the problem be solved otherwise? How?
or How do I justify my conclusion?
Teachers and student confidence
Students are also asked to indicate their metacognitive feelings in
problem solving and compare the judgments before and after problem solving. This makes them aware that feelings can be inaccurate and change:
Do you think you can easily solve the problem? (before)
How well do you understand the problem? Do you know how to solve it? (during)
How well do you think you solved the problem? (after)
Conclusions
• Confidence is a person characteristic as well as a feeling. In both forms it has major implications for learning and self-regulated learning.
• It impacts SRL through
• Self-beliefs
• Self-awareness of the accuracy of response in the absence of teacher or other external knowledge of results
• Triggering of metacognitive control decisions
• Triggering of motivational beliefs and emotions that support or undermine learning However, it can be inaccurate (over- or under-confidence) and coupled with lack of knowledge and skills it can undermine learning rather than promote it.
• Thank you for your attention!
