BETTER LEARNING THROUGH FEEDBACK: IMPROVING STUDENT PERFORMANCE AND JUDGMENT ACCURACY IN AN INTRODUCTORY GEOSCIENCE COURSE

Students’ perceptions of their performance often do not match reality. This disparity is rooted in an important educational skill called metacognitive monitoring accuracy. Predictive of student performance, metacognitive monitoring accuracy can dictate the effectiveness of many learning tasks and has been shown to be both variable and malleable in students. This study investigated the relationship between students’ judgments of their performance and their actual performance during summative exams in an introductory physical geology course. The study collected student confidence data for every question of three midterm exams over two semesters and compared this confidence to performance via an empirically-derived measure of the disparity between students’ perceptions of their performance and their actual performance called calibration accuracy. Additionally, students were asked to make a judgment of total performance on their exam after answering all questions (a “postdiction”). These “local” (item-level) and “global” (postdiction) measures of accuracy were analyzed in response to incremental changes in the course over two semesters. After adding metacognitive prompts into required course homework assignments to little cumulative effect, the platform of formative assessment was experimentally altered in the second study semester. The researcher-designed web-based quizzing system (titled CLASS) collected student performance and confidence data and automatically presented students with feedback regarding their monitoring accuracy related to geology content. Students utilizing the CLASS system performed significantly better than their predecessors on course exams and were generally more accurate in their judgments of their performance.