Why Students Think They Understand When They Don’t
American Educator, AFT
How do we know that we know something? If I said to you, “Could you name the first President of the United States?” you would say, “Yes, I could tell you that.” On the other hand, if I said, “Could you tell me the names of the two series of novels written by Anthony Trollope?” you might say, “No.” What processes go into your judgment of what you know? The answer may at first seem obvious: You look in your memory and see what’s there. For the first question, you determine that your memory contains the fact that George Washington was the first U.S. President, so you answer “yes.” For the second question, if you determine that your memory contains little information about Trollope (and doesn’t include the novel series named Barchester and Palliser), you would answer “no.”
But, if the mechanism were really so simple, we would seldom — if ever — make mistakes about what we know. In fact, we do make such mistakes. For example, we have all confidently thought that we knew how to get to a destination, but then when put to the test by actually having to drive there, we realize that we don’t know. The route may seem familiar, but that’s a far cry from recalling every turn and street name.
The feeling of knowing has an important role in school settings because it is a key determinant of student studying (e.g., Mazzoni & Cornoldi, 1993). Suppose a third-grader has been studying the Vikings with the goal of understanding where they were from and what they did. At what point does the third-grader say to him or herself: “I understand this. If the teacher asks me, ‘Who were the Vikings?’ I could give a good answer.”
Every teacher has seen that students’ assessments of their own knowledge are not always accurate. Indeed, this inaccuracy can be a source of significant frustration for students on examinations. The student is certain that he or she has mastered some material, yet performs poorly on a test, and may, therefore, conclude that the test was not fair. The student has assessed his or her knowledge and concluded that it is solid, yet the examination indicates that it is not. What happened? What cues do students use to decide that they know something?
Cognitive science research has shown that two cues are especially important in guiding our judgments of what we know: (1) our “familiarity” with a given body of information and (2) our “partial access” to that information. In this column, I’ll discuss how these two cues can lead students to believe that they know material when they don’t. And, in the box on page 41, I suggest ways that teachers can help students develop more realistic self-assessments of their knowledge.
"Familiarity" fools our mind into thinking we know more than we do
The idea of familiarity is, well, familiar to all of us. We have all had the experience of seeing someone and sensing that her face is familiar but being unable to remember who that person is or how we know her.
Psychologists distinguish between familiarity and recollection. Familiarity is the knowledge of having seen or otherwise experienced some stimulus before, but having little information associated with it in your memory. Recollection, on the other hand, is characterized by richer associations. For example, a young student might be familiar with George Washington (he knows he was a President and maybe that there’s a holiday named after him), whereas an older student could probably recollect a substantial narrative about him. (See Yonelinas, 2002, for an extended review of the differences between recollection and familiarity.)
Although familiarity and recollection are different, an insidious effect of familiarity is that it can give you the feeling that you know something when you really don’t. For example, it has been shown that if some key words of a question are familiar, you are more likely to think that you know the answer to the question. In one experiment demonstrating this effect (Reder, 1987), subjects were exposed to a variety of word pairs (e.g. “golf” and “par”) and then asked to complete a short task that required them to think at least for a moment about the words. Next, subjects saw a set of trivia questions, some of which used words that the subjects had just been exposed to in the previous task. Subjects were asked to make a rapid judgment as to whether or not they knew the answer to the question — and then they were to provide the answer.
If the trivia question contained key words from the previous task (e.g., “What term in golf refers to a score of one under par on a particular hole?”), those words should have seemed familiar, and may have led to a feeling of knowing. Indeed, Reder found that subjects were likely to say that they knew the answer to a question containing familiar words, irrespective of whether they could actually answer the question. For questions in which words had not been rendered familiar, subjects were fairly accurate in rapidly assessing their knowledge.
How students end up with "familiarity" and "partial access" to material
If a student believes that he knows material, he will likely divert attention elsewhere; he will stop listening, reading, working, or participating. Mentally “checking out” is never a good choice for students, but all the more so when they disengage because they think they know material that, in fact, they do not know. The feeling of knowing becomes a problem if you have the feeling without the knowing. There are some very obvious ways in which students can reach this unfortunate situation in a school setting. Here are several common ones:
1. Rereading. To prepare for an examination, a student rereads her classnotes and textbook. Along the way, she encounters familiar terms (“familiar” as in she knows she’s heard these terms before), and indeed they become even more familiar to her as she rereads. She thinks, “Yes, I’ve seen this, I know this, I understand this.” But feeling that you understand material as it is presented to you is not the same as being able to recount it yourself.
As teachers know, this gap between feeling that you know and genuine recollection can cause great frustration. I have frequently had exchanges in which one of my students protests that despite a low test grade, he or she really knew the material. When I ask a general question or two, the student struggles to answer and ends up sputtering, “I can’t exactly explain it, but I know it!” Invariably, a student with this problem has spent a great deal of time reading over the course material, yielding a lot of familiarity, but not the necessary and richer recollective knowledge.
2. Shallow Processing. A teacher may prepare an excellent lesson containing a good deal of deep meaning. But this deep meaning will only reside in a student’s memory if the student has actively thought about that deep meaning. Let’s say, for example, that a teacher has prepared a lesson on the European settlement of Australia and on the meaningful issue of whether that settlement should be viewed as a colonization or invasion. But, let’s say that a given student did not process and retain the deep meaning intended by the lesson. He did absorb key terms like “Captain Cook” and “Aborigines.” His familiarity with these key terms could mislead him into believing he was ready for a test on the subject.
3. Recollecting Related Information. Sometimes students know a lot of information related to the target topic, and that makes them feel as though they know the target information. (This is analogous to the subjects in the experiment who knew the names of many composers and so felt that they knew who composed Swan Lake.) Suppose that a fifth-grade class spent three weeks studying weather systems, including studying weather maps, collecting local data, keeping a weather journal, learning about catastrophic weather events like hurricanes, and so on. In preparation for a test, the teacher says that there will be a question on how meteorologists use weather maps to predict hurricanes. When the student hears “weather map,” she might recall such superficial information as that they are color coded, that they include temperature information, and so on; she feels she knows about weather maps and doesn’t study further. In fact, she hasn’t yet come to understand the core issue — how weather maps are used to predict weather. But her general familiarity with the maps has tricked her into believing she had the necessary knowledge when she didn’t. (Ironically, the problem of recollecting related information is most likely to occur when a student has mastered a good deal of material on the general topic; that is, he’s mastered related material, but not the target material. It’s the knowledge of the related material that creates the feeling of knowing.)
Cognitive science research confirms teachers’ impressions that students do not always know what they think they know. It also shows where this false sense of knowledge comes from and helps us imagine the kinds of teaching and learning activities that could minimize this problem. In particular, teachers can help students test their own knowledge in ways that provide more accurate assessments of what they really know — which enables students to better judge when they have mastered material and when (and where) more work is required.
See related article: How To Help Students See When Their Knowledge is Superficial or Incomplete(opens in a new window)
Publication Date:
Reprinted with permission from the Winter 2003-2004 issue of the American Educator, the quarterly journal of the American Federation of Teachers.
Source
http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/winter03-04/cognitive.html