Metacognitive calibration in college students: the relationship between calibration, test performance, and empathic skills

Abstract

Metacognition has been argued to play an important role in learning and performance in academic settings. Most of the self-regulated learning theories consider metacognitive calibration ability as central to successful learning. Calibration can be defined as one’s ability to evaluate one’s performance and is regarded as one of the most critical elements differentiating between capable and less capable learners. Recently, it has been argued that for metacognitive calibration to be more accurate, individuals should take the external criteria as reference in their evaluation of their performance. In this thesis, the main question of interest was whether and how metacognitive calibration contributed to students’ performance in a school setting. In addition, students’ calibration ability against an external criterion (in this case, the instructor) has been assessed in terms of their empathic ability. Results showed that better academic performance was positively correlated with higher metacognitive accuracy. In addition, better performing students showed underconfidence and poorer students showed overconfidence in their metacognitive judgments. There was no relationship between emphatic skills of the students and their metacognitive ability.