While confidence is important for students to persistently pursue their academic goals, overconfidence may be detrimental to students’ academic performance. For instance, students who are overly confident about certain topics may make ineffective studying decisions such as allocating less time to restudy those topics that they wrongly assume to know well. Senko et al. conducted experiments to test whether compelling teachings that typically catch a student’s situational interest spur overconfidence. Situational interest (SI) is a form of interest that prompts learning through contextual cues. For example, a teacher may present a funny song relevant to the topic that the students are learning; instead of studying the details of a topic, students may resort to that song as a form of studying. To measure overconfidence, the researchers collected both student’s judgment of learning (JOL), meaning how well a student thinks they understand a topic and how well they can recall it, and calibration bias, which refers to the discrepancy between one’s estimated performance and actual performance.
In the first experiment, 226 college students were asked to prepare for a test based on provided readings of a physics test. The students were measured for their SI (situational interest) in the topic on a scale from 1 (strongly disinterested) to 5 (strongly interested). The participants were randomly assigned to the control tutorial condition, which assembled a physics lecture on lightning, or the fun condition, which included both the physics content and supplements aiming to trigger interest (i.e. funny memes). After the tutorial session, the researchers measured student’s judgment of learning (JOL) by asking the participants to rate their confidence in the topic from 0% to 100%. Lastly, participants were instructed to recall and list everything they learned from the tutorial. The researchers then calculated the calibration bias by subtracting the recall performance from the performance estimates. Additionally, students that stated a low JOL (average of 62%), performed even worse than they scored themselves (average of 56%). The results interestingly reflected that the fun tutorial facilitated student’s SI, which then enhanced their overconfidence on how well they understood the core instructional content and lowered their performance in recalling the core content.
The following study addressed the limitations of the first study by manipulating the attractiveness of the core content instead of adding irrelevant entertaining details to the learning materials. A total of 196 college student participants were first asked, on a scale from 1-5, about their SI on Hare Krishna and Hinduism. The participants were then tasked to read 8 passages that were equally easy to read. The first 4 passages were about the history of Hare Krishna, including its founder and biography. The last 4 passages intentionally sparked SI by including topics that the researchers assumed college students would enjoy, including Hare Krishna’s influence on rock music, hippies, and dietary restrictions. The students were then asked to take a quiz of 24 multiple choice questions and select one topic that they would like to study for a hypothetical quiz. The quiz results suggested that students did not get lower scores for the fun passages, rather, they consistently performed similarly for the majority of the passages. However, when looking at their levels of confidence, students had a higher level of confidence for the last four fun passages than the first four control ones as a result of greater SI triggered by the fun passages. Moreover, students tended to choose a control passage that they had lower SI and confidence in terms of understanding instead of a fun passage which they were interested in and were overly confident about. Taken these two studies together, while fun teaching methods promote student’s situational interest, neither the entertaining material nor increased interest enhance performance. Instead, they boost overconfidence about how well one udnerstands the learning materials, which in turn affects one’s decision in allocating time and efforts for restudying.
Senko et al.’s study provides several implications for both teachers and students. For instance, the findings from the study suggest teachers should be mindful of the consequences of using interesting teaching materials and subsequently monitor students’ confidence levels and performance outcomes more carefully. By understanding the results of this experiment, students can also become more aware of their confidence level and interest in learning materials and allocate their efforts reasonably.
In relation to EPIC’s research studies, Senko et al. 's work points to a potential future research direction that investigates how situational interest is related to confidence level and performance outcomes for tough topics that a student is not very good at. This line of research may help decipher how students persist through hardships and what educators can do to promote the persistence of students.
If you are interested in reading further about Senko’s study, check out the link to retrieve the journal article:
https://doi-org.tc.idm.oclc.org/10.1037/edu0000649
This post was written by Emma Hong.
Reference:
Senko, C., Perry, A. H., & Greiser, M. (2022). Does triggering learners’ interest make them overconfident? Journal of Educational Psychology, 114(3), 482–497.
