Effects of collaboration and informing students about overconfidence on metacognitive judgment in conceptual learning

The effects of collaborative learning and informing students about the dangers of overconfidence on metacognitive judgments and conceptual learning were examined in two classroom studies. In the first study, the conceptual knowledge of operant conditioning and the confidence judgments of 287 graduate students enrolled in a teacher education programme were assessed at the beginning of the educational psychology course and following instruction that included student work on examples of operant conditioning concepts, either individually or in small groups. Students’ recognition of the concepts in examples and explanations of their answers were collected during learning along with ratings of their confidence in their answers. Students in the collaborative learning condition showed higher confidence in their answers on both tasks, but they also showed higher bias in their judgments on the explanation task. They also displayed better recognition of the concepts and discrimination between accurate and inaccurate recognition. The second study aimed to examine the effect of a more structured collaborative learning condition and the effect of informing students about the dangers of overconfident judgments on students’ confidence in the accuracy of their answers on the same tasks as in the first study and on their performance. The participants were 223 students enrolled in the teacher education programme. A strong positive effect of collaboration on discrimination and performance on both tasks was obtained. Furthermore, the students in the collaborative learning condition showed lower bias in the explanation task. Informing students about the dangers of overconfidence did not have beneficial effects.