Using feedback to reduce students' judgment bias on test questions

Judgment bias represents a common tendency of people to inaccurately gauge the extent of their own knowledge. While research has shown that people tend to overestimate their knowledge on hard questions and underestimate their knowledge on easy questions, overconfidence poses a more pernicious problem from an educational perspective since it can undermine students' ability to monitor their own learning effectively and interfere with their test performance. The findings of the present study show that students who perform poorly on a test are more overconfident about their answers to hard test questions, especially those they answer wrongly, than are students who perform better. The results also show that judgment bias can be reduced by providing feedback to students about their prior performance and confidence on specific test questions. This intervention was found to be effective in decreasing both underconfidence on easy questions and overconfidence on hard questions regardless of students' performance level.