Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

by Peter C. Brown

In one series of studies that demonstrate this finding, they gave students a test of logic and asked them to rate their own performance. In the first experiment the results confirmed expectations that the least competent students were the most out of touch with their performance: students who scored at the twelfth percentile on average believed that their general logical reasoning ability fell at the sixty-eighth percentile. In a second experiment, after taking an initial test and rating their own performance, the students were shown the other students’ answers and then their own answers and asked to reestimate the number of test questions they had answered correctly. The students whose performance was in the bottom quartile failed to judge their own performance more accurately after seeing the more competent choices of their peers and in fact tended to raise their already inflated estimates of their own ability.