Let students know they don’t know

One thing I’ve noticed during my lengthy teaching career is that many students are often not aware that their understanding falls short. They are oblivious as to whether they have properly understood – or have misunderstood – a particular concept. These are the same students who expect a mark of 90 but end up in shock and send angry emails demanding a recount when they receive a 60. Sound familiar?

I argue that this is partly due to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which posits that those who are incompetent do not have sufficient competency to even realise their own incompetence. Whatever the underlying cause, how do we, as teachers, address this problem?

Assessment and feedback

Overconfidence prevents students from being able to identify areas of weakness themselves, so they need others to help them realise. One way of doing this is to provide feedback to students throughout the semester, perhaps through an agenda of formative assessments. While being cautious not to over-assess students, the idea is to introduce an opportunity to give them feedback. The feedback should be specific and help students identify areas where they excel and areas that they need to work on. Once they discover their errors, hopefully, they will go back and revisit this part and/or clarify misunderstandings with the teacher. This feedback improvement loop is the basis of active learning.

Feedback can be as simple as their mark. This sets off alarm bells if student expectations are set too high, and students will calibrate them to something more realistic. Better yet, feedback will inform students not only of the problem, but also why something is misunderstood. Splitting off some lecture time to go over common problems works well in large classes when it is too time-consuming to give individualised feedback.

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Metacognition

My second piece of advice is to use metacognitive practice exercises in class. Instead of asking students for the correct answer, ask them about the process behind deriving the answer. You could also present them with an incorrect answer and ask them to explain why it is incorrect.

To demonstrate this, I can ask the first question of the Cognitive Reflection Test in its original form:

A bat and ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Alternatively, the same question can be framed in another way:

A bat and ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. Explain why the ball does not cost 10 cents.

Although the two questions are equivalent, the second invokes higher-order thinking and reflection. Students will come to realise that the answer is not the instinctive “10 cents” that jumped out at them as the answer to the first question. If the ball does cost 10 cents and the bat costs $1 more than the ball, then the bat itself must cost $1.10. The problem, then, is that the bat and the ball together would cost $1.20 ($1.10 + 0.10), which is more than the $1.10 total. Therefore, the ball cannot be 10 cents. Students can go on to work out that the ball must cost five cents. This way, they are learning through reflection and verbalisation.

Framing a question this way requires students to slow down, reflect and think through the details, which students may tend to neglect. Sometimes students know something to be instinctively true or false, but otherwise difficult to verbalise and explain why: this challenges them to do so. It also works because students are much better at scrutinising and picking apart what others have to say than reflecting on what they say themselves. Proving something wrong also requires a different skill set from proving something right.

Managing expectations, pointing to areas of improvement and helping students become more cognisant of their abilities and deficiencies are easier said than done – so don’t expect any silver bullets. But if you do succeed in helping students realise their own shortcomings, you could spark a light-bulb moment that they will look back on as a positive step in their learning journey.

Tony So is a teaching fellow at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China.

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