Innovation

I first became interested in how the intricacies of assessment related to my research on sentiment analysis, peer review, text mining, and crowdsourcing. I soon discovered research on “confidence weighting” and cognitive monitoring (Beasley, 2015 and Jack, 2011) which deal with students’ perception of their ability to answer questions on assessments. Since this research fascinated me, I decided to test it in the classroom. Here is how it works:

During the test or quiz, a student chooses a confidence per regular question: 1 – low, 2 – normal, 3 – high. The student receives a small grade increase (+) or decrease (–) according to the following chart (no grade change for neutral confidence):

This rewards students for using metacognition (thinking about one’s thoughts) to truthfully acknowledge their confidence. It penalizes misconceptions and guesses. The purpose of confidence weighting is three-fold: 1) for students to be rewarded for metacognition (deeper thinking) 2) for the instructor to understand class-wide consistencies – hard question, improperly taught/understood concept, or incorrect answer, and 3) for the instructor to have hard evidence to discuss with students who are overall confident, un-confident, or who have misconceptions.

Out of four exams for one hundred and ninety-two students, only six students (3%) lost up to one point using confidence weighting. The vast majority increased their exams scores by as many as seven points. In a post-confidence weighting survey, only one student found confidence weighting hard to understand (out of 30), and no student responded that it was “unfair” (in fact, the majority, n=19, thought it was “very fair”). This confirms previous research, in which confidence weighting has been shown to be enjoyed by students and improve test scores. Careful and data-driven innovation in the classroom, of which confidence weighting is a good example, propels educators to a new level of excellence, creates a more enjoyable and less mundane classroom environment, and results in student engagement and success.