Metacognitive Accuracy in Homework Assignments, Time-Limited Quizzes, and Learning Objectives

Abstract

How confident students are about their solutions is essential to instructors. It reflects how students understand the course materials and how they learn in the course. Studies usually use “Metacognitive Accuracy” to refer to the relationship between a student’s confidence or estimated performance and actual performance.

In our study, 170 students estimated their performances for individual tasks in homework assignments and their total performances in time-limited quizzes. The study was conducted in an upper-year database course. In this paper, we propose research questions related to students’ estimations in homework assignments, time-limited quizzes, and different learning objectives. We found that students can estimate their homework assignments and time-limited quizzes differently. They also expose different over- and underestimation patterns under different learning objectives.