Students’ confidence in mathematics

Many school students, even those who struggle in mathematics, are over-confident, meaning that they expect more of their answers to be correct than actually are. Other students are under-confident, and are repeatedly surprised that their answers were correct. Students’ poor calibration gets in the way of learning, because it discourages over-confident students from attending to their weaker areas, and delays under-confident students from moving on to new material.

This project measured how well-calibrated students were by asking them to say how sure they were that each of the answers they had just given was correct. We tried to improve students’ calibration by using confidence assessment, which incorporates ‘negative marking’ to reward accurate calibration and penalise both over- and under-confidence. Better calibrated students should find it easier to focus their energies where they will do the most good to help them improve. They should also gain more satisfaction from their study of mathematics a find it a less bewildering and stressful subject to learn.

We found that students’ poor calibration is hard to improve and we have not yet found an improvement in their calibrated over time with consistent use of confidence assessment. For this to work, teacher professional development may be critical.