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Article Excerpt
College students' metacognitive self-assessments before and after tests were examined in relation to personality and study time. Instead of using laboratory learning, our study is the first to use actual classroom learning and testing across a period of several months to study the dynamic relation between personality, study time, and cognitive self-assessments. Our findings revealed that competitive students gave higher metacognitive self-assessments than less competitive students and that students who had a tendency to show concern about others' opinions spent more time studying for tests. In addition, students were able to use previous testing experience to adjust their study time and metacognitive self-evaluations correspondingly on later tests. High self-monitors were especially more likely to use feedback from earlier tests to alter metacognitive self-judgments.
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One area of research in metacognition examines the relations between individuals' evaluations of their cognition and actual learning outcomes. For example, individuals may be asked to assess the adequacy of their memory or comprehension of texts, and their self-assessments are examined in relation to actual memory or comprehension performance (e.g., Hertzog, Dixon, & Hultsch, 1990; Lin & Zabrucky, 1998). Researchers examining both metamemory (metacognitive skills in memory) and metacomprehension (metacognitive skills in comprehension) have accumulated a great deal of evidence on individuals' tendency to be overconfident in the assessments of their memory or comprehension performance (e.g., Glenberg & Epstein, 1985, 1987; Juslin, 1994; Koriat, 1998; Lichtenstein, Fischhoff, & Phillips, 1982). This phenomenon was first termed "illusion of knowing" by Glenberg, Wilkinson, and Epstein (1982).
Since metacognitive assessments involve subjective feelings of self-ability in cognitive tasks, certain personality constructs, such as one's achievement motivation, may influence how individuals perceive their cognitive ability. Researchers have suggested that the study of metacognition should take person variables such as individual interest, self-esteem, and motivation into consideration because psychological and emotional processes may mediate the degree to which people accurately monitor their knowledge (e.g., Bouffard-Bouchard, 1994; Lin, Zabrucky, & Moore, 1997; Osman & Hannafin, 1992).
Few studies have investigated the effects of person and "self" variables on the accuracy of metacognitive judgments (e.g., Kroll & Ford, 1992; Lin et al., 1997). For example, to study the effect of motivational orientation on illusion of knowing, Kroll and Ford (1992) measured two forms of motivational orientation. One is ego-oriented motivation, which involves setting goals to demonstrate ability to self and others rather than to increase mastery of skills. The other is task-oriented motivation, which involves setting goals to master and understand the task itself rather than to increase self-image. Kroll and Ford (1992) found that ego-oriented students were less accurate at metacognitive monitoring and gave higher metacognitive assessments than task-involved students, resulting in a greater degree of illusion of knowing.
Thus, a negative correlation seems to exist between people's desire to project capable self-ability to others and the accuracy of their metacognitive monitoring. To further investigate how ego-involved motivation affects metacognitive accuracy, Lin, Moore, and Zabrucky (2001) differentiated between two types of ego-oriented individuals. One type of ego-involved individuals, called "self-monitored" individuals by Snyder (1987), are people who desire to create positive self-image but are attentive to using environmental feedback to further regulate their public self-image. With the provision of feedback and social cues, ego-involved but self-monitored individuals who are attentive to environmental input can often accurately monitor their knowledge. Another type of ego-involved individuals, on the other hand, focuses on presenting a desirable self-image through denying self-inadequacies. These individuals often are not adept at using others' feedback for improving their public self. It is this type of ego-involved individuals whose...
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