Assistant Professor of Psychology Nayantara Kurpad and colleagues recently published an article titled “Low-performing students confidently overpredict their grade performance throughout the semester” in a special issue (The Intersection of Metacognition and Intelligence) of the open access Journal of Intelligence.
Students are often inaccurate in predicting their grades prior to an exam. Specifically, low-performers often over-predict their performance compared to high-performers. In this study, researchers wanted to understand if low-performers remain overconfident in their performance all through a semester. Through in-class data collection (actual students' performance and predictions) they found that low-performers continue to exhibit overconfidence throughout the semester. This stability in low-performers' predictions is concerning as low-performing students are not correcting their overconfident exam predictions even after several exam experiences. Results from this research suggest that we need to intervene and help low-performers in their metacognitive awareness.
You can read the entire article here.
Kurpad also recently facilitated a 2-hour interactive session about the science of learning over Zoom for the Lower Pioneer Valley Education Collaboration (LPVEC) based in Massachusetts. The group of about 75 teachers and aides included technical and vocational education instructors, their technical assistants, their inclusion specialists and counselors; it also included special education teachers, classroom and 1:1 aides from separate programs. All the participants took home key principles of retrieval practice, spaced practice and metacognition. Session feedback has been positive. She is looking to collaborate with St. Mary's County Schools; if anyone has leads, please contact her at nkurpad@smcm.edu.
