1. Why Paired Confidence-Competence Measures Could be the Most Important Measures of All for Assessment of Student Success
AABSS 2019 Conference – Las Vegas, Nevada, February 25-26
Dr. Steven Fleisher, Psychology Faculty
California State University Channel Islands
Dr. Edward Nuhfer, Professor, Director of Faculty Development California State University (retired)

2. ... co-researchers Chris Cogan, Memorial University
Rachel Watson, University of Wyoming
Kali Nicholas Moon, University of Wyoming
Rick Zechman, Humboldt State University
Paul Walter, St Edwards University
Karl Wirth, Macalester College
Ami Wangeline, Laramie County Community College
Eric Gaze, Bowdoin College
And over 25,000 participants – “Cast of thousands!”

3. Confidence-competence measures have a long history of being done poorly.

4. Destructive Message 1 Self-Assessment is Random Nonsense
Peer-reviewed literature
Implications for people
People’s feelings about their own abilities are simply random guessing. Their feelings have no value as a source of information to assess real knowledge or skill.
You may believe that you know yourself, but don't take that belief too seriously. Peoples’ beliefs about themselves don’t match reality.

5. Destructive Message 2. People have overly inflated views of their own abilities
Peer-reviewed literature
Implications for people
The vast majority overestimate what they actually know or can do. Those who are the least skilled have the most overinflated opinions of their abilities.
People may collectively believe that they can accomplish a shared aspiration, in reality that aspiration will not likely be practical. However, experts in authority can show members of society where their limits are.

6. Message 3. People are pretty ____ good at self-assessment, and collectively groups are awesome at it.
Peer-reviewed literature
Implications for people
Most people have the ability to self-assess their present knowledge and skills with reasonable accuracy. Only a few people have highly overinflated views of their abilities.
If people believe that they are capable of achieving a shared aspiration, it is very likely that they can find a way to achieve it.

7. We are either mostly like...
or we are mostly like...

8. ...unskilled and unaware of it

9. Seminal Paper 1999 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
First serious effort to quantify self-assessment.
First to demonstrate self-assessment is teachable.
We now know more, but only because of the foundation that they began to build.

10. The Dunning-Kruger Effect
“People are typically overly optimistic when evaluating the quality of their performance on social and intellectual tasks. In particular, poor performers grossly overestimate their performances because their incompetence deprives them of the skills needed to recognize their deficits” (Ehrlinger, Johnson, Banner, Dunning, & Kruger, 2008).

11. The Dunning-Kruger Effect in a K-D Graph
Blue – Self-assessed competency
Red – Measured competency
The Dunning–Kruger effect expresses that relatively unskilled people suffer illusory superiority and mistakenly assess their abilities to be much higher than they really are. Conversely, persons with high ability tend to underestimate their relative competence. “...their incompetence deprives them of the skills needed to recognize their deficits.”

12. What “perfect signal” looks like...
What random noise looks like...

13. ...what strong associations between self-assessed competence and actual competence look like...

14. ...and what strong associations do not look like.

15. How well do people self-assess?

16. Individuals’ Self-Assessment Accuracies from Knowledge Survey

17. Individuals’ Self-Assessment Accuracies from Postdicted

18. Groups (n =50): Self-Assessment Accuracies

19. Accuracy by Means of Groups of Size N for Paired Measures of Confidence with Competence

20. Now, What can we learn about our institutions from such paired measures?

21. What we ought to see...

22. Well...POOP!

24. Some places do better’n others

25. Best Case

26. Good Case

27. Fair Case

28. How about bringing this to our students?

29. My Spring 2019 Classes

30. Show of Hands!! How Many of You...
Scored higher than 50% on the SLCI?
Scored higher than 70% on the SLCI?
Scored Higher than 80% on the SLCI?

31. Show of Hands!! How Many of You...
Were accurate in your self-assessment within ± 30 ppts or less?
Were accurate in your self-assessment within ± 20 ppts or less?
Were accurate in your self-assessment within ± 10 ppts or less?

32. Show of Hands!! How Many of You...
Have ever been asked to estimate your self-assessment accuracy on a college test?
Have received a measure of your self-assessment accuracy as feedback?

33. Correlation Relationships of
My Classes, Spring 2019

34. Look at Groups by Science Courses Taken

35. How Close Do Groups’ Confidence Track SLCI Scores?

36. How Close Do Groups’ Confidence Track SLCI Scores?

37. Genders – Who scores highest overall (24,000 Participants)?
Neither men nor women score significantly differently.

38. Genders – Who scores highest in my classes?

39. Why in my classes?

40. Who self-assesses more accurately?

41. Dominant Ethnicities Who scores highest in my classes?

42. Why in my classes?

43. Who self-assesses more accurately?

44. How well did we do?

45. How well did we do? Second measure on postdicted self-assessment

46. NCC Metacognition & Motivation Workshop
Wirth - Cutting Edge Metacognition Workshop
5/1/2019
Pedagogical Challenge
Metacognition (including self-assessment) is a “self-imposed internal conversation.”
Metacognition is essential to becoming an expert learner (strategic, self-regulated, and reflective).
Easily assumed that students are doing it, or can develop on their own; both assumptions are wrong.
Challenge is to keep students in constant contact with their metacognition.
Instruction must be explicit (Pintrich, 2002).
Metacognitive self-assessment may be the most beneficial skill to develop (Pintrich, 2002; Rivers, 2001). 46

47. END