Dunning and Kruger discovered that as student performance decreases their tendency to over-estimate their ability increases. This has been demonstrated across disciplines and within chemistry, illustrating poor metacognitive monitoring in the bottom performing students. During the fall 2016 semester in the first semester of general chemistry, a homework system was implemented to train students in metacognition. Weekly quizzes and practice tests were given to all students, and after which students received feedback of their score and ability by topic. In a treatment section, students were trained in metacognition by first predicting their score on each practice test and weekly quiz. After feedback was provided, students answered a homework question about areas of weakness and strength for each assessment and created a study plan after each practice test. In a control section, students received weekly quizzes, practice tests, and feedback by topic but did not receive additional training in metacognition. Results on the first quiz demonstrated that the bottom students in the treatment section significantly overestimated their score on the first quiz, but over time this overestimation has decreased, demonstrating an improvement in student metacognitive monitoring. Though the semester is still in progress, results of the first two tests demonstrate that the treatment section performed 4-5% better (p &lt; 0.01), on average, than the control section. Further analysis of these results indicated that the bottom quartile of students in the treatment section outperformed the bottom quartile in the control section by 6-9% on these midterms as a result of the metacognitive training.

Targeting the general chemistry bottom quartile through homework-based metacognitive training

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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