Metacognitive monitoring accuracy and student performance in the postsecondary classroom

The literature on metacognition suggests that having students practice metacognitive monitoring consistently should lead to significant improvement over time. In this study, students practiced metacognitive monitoring through the course of a full semester. The authors then examined changes in monitoring accuracy,judgment bias, and their relationship with academic performance. Students made local monitoring judgments for each test item in addition to a single global monitoring judgment on each classroom test. Results revealed stability in monitoring accuracy across tests. Global judgments were more accurate than local judgments, but student performance was related to local accuracy exclusively, even after controlling for student grade point average. Difficulty of test items was, predictably, related to poor accuracy and overconfidence. This study is one of the first studies to examine these processes in a naturalistic setting over a substantial period of time.