IJSSER

Title: SELF-ASSESSMENT OF UNDERSTANDING: WE DON’T ALWAYS KNOW WHAT WE KNOW
Authors: John Leddo, PhD , Ava Clark and Emma Clark
\|\| \|\|
John Leddo, PhD1 , Ava Clark2 and Emma Clark2 1. Director of Research at MyEdMaster. 2. researchers at MyEdMaster.
MLA 8 Leddo, John, et al. "SELF-ASSESSMENT OF UNDERSTANDING: WE DON’T ALWAYS KNOW WHAT WE KNOW." nt. j. of Social Science and Economic Research, vol. 6, no. 6, June 2021, pp. 1717-1725, doi.org/10.46609/IJSSER.2021.v06i06.005. Accessed June 2021. APA 6 Leddo, J., Clark, A., & Clark, E. (2021, June). SELF-ASSESSMENT OF UNDERSTANDING: WE DON’T ALWAYS KNOW WHAT WE KNOW. nt. j. of Social Science and Economic Research, 6(6), 1717-1725. Retrieved from doi.org/10.46609/IJSSER.2021.v06i06.005 Chicago Leddo, John, Ava Clark, and Emma Clark. "SELF-ASSESSMENT OF UNDERSTANDING: WE DON’T ALWAYS KNOW WHAT WE KNOW." nt. j. of Social Science and Economic Research 6, no. 6 (June 2021), 1717-1725. Accessed June, 2021. doi.org/10.46609/IJSSER.2021.v06i06.005.
References [1]. Ericsson, K. A., & Simon, H. A. (1984). Protocol analysis: Verbal reports as data. The MIT Press. [2]. John, A., Shahzadi, G. & Khan, K.I. (2016). Students’ Preferred Learning Styles and Academic Performance. Sci.Int.(Lahore),28(4),337-341. [3]. Leddo, J. and Cohen, M.S. (1989). Cognitive structure analysis: A technique for eliciting the content and structure of expert knowledge. Proceedings of 1989 AI Systems in Government Conference. McLean, VA: The MITRE Corporation. [4]. Leddo, J. and Sak, S. (1994) Knowledge Assessment: Diagnosing what students really know. Presented at Society for Technology and Teacher Education. [5]. Leddo, J., Guo, Y., Liang, Y., Joshi, R., Liang, I., Guo, W. and Bailey, S. (2019). Artificial Intelligence and Voice-powered Electronic Textbooks. International Journal of Advanced Educational Research, 4(6), 44-49. [6]. Leddo, J., Chen, T., Menachery, A., Agarwal, J. and Agarwal, T. (2021). Towards Improving Personal Assistants and Educational Software: How Questions Are Answered Affects Learning. International Journal of Social Science and Economic Research, 6(02), 696-705. [7]. Nibett, R.E. and Wilson, T.D. (1977). Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes. Psychological Review, 84(3), 231-259.
Abstract: Personal assistants and educational software both convey information to their users. Personal assistants allow users to ask questions but generally do not check to insure that users understood the answers. Educational software generally does not allow users to ask questions and typically assesses understanding of content through testing. The present project explores whether simply asking people if they understand information they are given is an accurate way to assess their understanding. 18 middle school students and 19 adults were taught topics in quadratics on a Google Form. After each piece of instruction, they were asked whether or not they understood what they were taught. Upon completion of the instruction, they were given problems to solve based on the lessons. Participants’ self-assessments of whether or not they understood what they learned were matched to whether or not they gave the correct answers to the corresponding problems. Results showed that when indicating that they understood the lessons, students correctly answered associated problems 66.2% of the time and adults correctly answered them 73.6% of the time. These percentages were both statistically higher than a 50-50 coin flip in terms of their diagnositicity, but also significantly lower than 99% (near perfect diagnositicity). When indicating that they did not understand the lesson, students gave the wrong answer 62.5% of the time and adults gave the wrong answer 90.4% of the time. This percentage for students was significantly lower than the 99% level but not statistically different from 50%. The percentage for adults was significantly higher than 50% but significantly lower than 99%. Results suggest that self-assessments of understanding are somewhat diagnostic of true understanding (or lack thereof) but not sufficiently diagnostic to be relied on by themselves.

IJSSER is Member of