How accuracy in students’ self-perceptions relates to success in learning

Most teachers are all too familiar with the challenge of helping students who remain baffled about why they are not doing well in class. “But I studied so hard! ” students might say. “I don’t understand how I could have gotten such a low test score! ” The frequency of such concerns among students highlights the difficulty that students face when trying to understand whether they have truly mastered learning a topic, when they prepared themselves well for exams, and when their learning might fall short. Effective learning requires metacognition — the process of reflecting upon which learning concepts one has already mastered, what still needs to be learned, and how to best approach the task of learning. Within educational contexts, metacognitive perceptions are defined as students ’ beliefs about their learning process, including the degree to which they have mastered learning tasks. Students’ metacognitive perceptions reflect the degree to which they believe that they understand lesson material and have mastered learning different concepts or tasks. In this chapter, we review research suggesting that students ’ metacognitive perceptions are often error-prone. We discuss factors that introduce error into students ’ perceptions and offer concrete suggestions designed to help encourage greater accuracy in students ’ perceptions and, in turn, to facilitate student learning. Accuracy of Metacognitive Perception