Targeting Metacognition by Incorporating Student-Reported Confidence Estimates on Self-Assessment Quizzes

Being able to accurately self-assess one's own understanding is a crucial metacognitive skill that enables students to allocate their study time and energy more effectively. Prior works have explored different metacognition-based interventions but they were either not reliably effective or heavy-weight. In this work, we present Compass, an intervention composed of self-assessment quizzes that additionally ask students to self-report their confidence level per answer in order to automatically recommend prioritized sets of resources. We found that although frequent self-assessment quiz taking correlated with higher exam performance, the repeated practice of self-reporting confidence levels did not seem to benefit students' metacognitive accuracy over time. Our findings also challenge the commonly accepted hypothesis that high-performing students have high metacognitive accuracy.