Those of you in my Science of Education module will have heard my talk on Metacognition and Rationality, which was based on my first blog post for this topic. Those of you who didn’t see it, don’t panic, I’ll be uploading the talk to this blog within the week. During the talk, I mentioned SAFMEDS cards and how they help build a person’s “Knowing of knowing”, a metacognitive thought process that helps determine a level of confidence that a person can have about their own knowledge.
Essentially, when you use flash cards or SAFMEDS (Say All Fast a Minute Every Day Shuffled), after a few sessions you will have some rough idea whether you know what is on the other side of the card or not. This generates confidence, essentially, the question you pose your self is “Do I know this? Yes or No?”. A metacognitive thinker would be confident that they knew the answer to the cards they answered correctly, and doubtful about the answers they gave to the cards that they got wrong, as this ultimately reflects their own knowledge of their thoughts, as they are aware of their own level of proficiency within a particular field.
Confidence is very important when it comes to education. It enhances motivation towards a subject (Bénabou and Tirole, 2002), which aids a person’s will to learn more about a particular topic. It also seems to have a large impact on the attitude you take to a given field (Levine and Donitsa-Schmidt, 1998) (Woodrow, 1994), which creates a cyclic process of learning, becoming confident within that field, and increasing your attitude towards it, which makes you want to learn more about it and so on and so on. Previous research conducted at Bangor University (Personal Communication, 2013) shows that confidence in your answer does lead to a “knowing of knowing”, a key skill of metacognition, which is a vital part of education as noted by my previous blog.
A person’s confidence can be misled however. Kelley and Lindsay (1993) proposed that confidence can occur due to ease of retrieval of information rather than a true level of insight into one’s own familiarity with a subject. Whilst the study itself was concerned only with the ability to answer general knowledge questions, we are as of yet unsure as to its generalisability to specific topic related questions. The level of confidence that a person has around a particular topic generates a positive effect upon a person’s perceived level of knowledge within a subject (Simonson et al. 1987), yet how can we be sure that a perceived level of knowledge is correct? Overconfidence can lead to a person mistakenly believing that they are correct when they are in fact not, a worrying area of folly for any in education.
Bénabou, R., & Tirole, J. (2002). Self-confidence and personal motivation. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 117(3), 871-915.
Levine, T., & Donitsa-Schmidt, S. (1998). Computer use, confidence, attitudes, and knowledge: A causal analysis. Computers in human behavior, 14(1), 125-146.
Simonson, M. R., Maurer, M., Montag-Torardi, M., & Whitaker, M. (1987). Development of a standardized test of computer literacy and a computer anxiety index. Journal of educational computing research, 3(2), 231-247.
This is an interesting area of research. It would be very easy for lecturers to come up with SAFMED cards for their module and post them online. It could also be used with children as they are an easy system to use and via across a wide range of subjects. One drawback is that research suggests that students can suffer from overconfidence in their feeling of knowing (Huff & Nietfeld, 2009; Miller & Geraci, 2011). Do you have any suggestions of how this effect could be combatted?
References
Huff, J. D. & Nietfeld, J. L. (2009). Using strategy instruction and confidence judgments to improve metacognitive monitoring. Metacognition Learning, 4, 161-176.
Miller, T. M., Geraci, L. (2011). Training metacognition in the classroom: The influence on incentives and feedback on exam predictions. Metacognition and Learning, 6, 303-314.
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