Our confidence research paper is here
More tips from Craig Barton
Video transcript
hello i’m craig barton and welcome to this tips for teachers video now a few years ago on my diagnostic questions website we started experimenting by adding a confidence rating to our questions so every time a student answers a question on diagnostic questions they decide whether what they think the right answer is we prompt them to give an explanation and then we say how confident do you feel in your answer and when we analyze results from over 10 000 students we found two really interesting things about getting this sense of confidence before a student knows whether they’re right or not so the first is there is a big old spread between students perception of their understanding as measured by their confidence score and their actual understanding as measured by the proportion of questions they actually get right there’s definitely a positive correlation the more confident you are the more likely you are to be right but look at the spread crucially we’ve all taught kids who kind of live up here the ones who tell us they know everything but they don’t have a flipping clue what’s going on but we’ve also all taught kids who live down here who are really low confident but actually seem to understand a lot more than they think they do so that’s one thing that’s not what i wanted to talk to you about because we found something else and that is if we prompt students to indicate how confident they are and then we retest them later on the same area of mathematics after we’ve corrected any errors then what we found was that the questions were the students were more confident were more likely to be corrected then the questions were they were less confident and remember this is all errors these are all mistakes so high confidence errors were more likely to be corrected than low confidence errors and that’s after we controlled for measures of prior attainment and so on now this finding we wrote up and we published in september of 2021 and it’s got a name and it’s called based on the work of janet mccarth the hyper correction effect and the hypercorrection effect says this errors endorsed i love that word with higher confidence are more likely to be corrected on a final test than errors endorsed with lower confidence now why is this the case and the way i think about this is like a cognitive shock you say i’m super confident tonight you find out you’re wrong and you’re like whoa okay and maybe you’re prompted to pay a bit more attention to what’s going on and anyway you’re more likely to be able to correct that error in the future now the question is how can we use this practically because it’s not just on diagnostic questions so i use this a lot in low stakes quizzes so here’s an example of oliver’s low stakes quiz here and i want to draw your attention to question three and question four now in the boxes olive has been prompted to indicate how confident he feels on a scale from zero to ten so question three simultaneous equations oliver he knows you don’t have a clue what’s going on there but question four on long division oliver reckons he’s absolutely nailed this one but he’s made mistakes in both of them or he’s got both of them wrong now where do i want oliver directing his attention when he goes through it i want him looking at question four it’s his highest confident error that’s where he’s going to get his biggest bang for his buck when he does his reviewing so what i say to students is okay when you’ve finished your quiz your homework whatever it may be and i’ll show you some more examples in a second before you find out your answers either i mark them or they mark them themselves indicate how confident you feel then when you’ve marked your work start thinking hard about your highest confident errors first it gives students a definite focus of where to direct their attention to i’ll show you another example i really like this one i was lucky enough to be in a year 11 class and the students were working through a mock exam a practice paper and i’d this had caught my eye so this student had been working on a volume question and i’d spotted the mistake they’d made it’s a triangular prism and they haven’t divided by two and working out the area of the face but notice this girl is super confident 10 out of 10 on this one here so i wanted to know what happened when she found out that she was wrong and it was brilliant right you should have seen her face a jaw dropped she did a little bit of a double take she asked a mate just to see what was going on and then she was frantically jotting down and correct and you can almost see the cognitive shock happening it’s really good to help focus kids attention and get them kind of reviewing their answer with a bit of structure i also love this from ben gordon and i think this is a brilliant idea so this is a practice paper a mock exam that was taken home for homework and what ben asked his students to do was before they handed in once they’ve answered all their questions indicate how confident they feel about each of their answers crucially before they know whether they’re right or wrong and you can see here this student 8 out of 10 confidence on a percentage question it’s a reverse percentage question the student hasn’t realized that they’ve got it wrong but what ben did which was really clever was instead of doing the thing that we’ve all done which is right reams of feedback that the kids don’t pay the slightest bit of attention to ben said okay here’s your paperback here’s your mark what i want you to do is find your three highest confident errors and see if you can correct them so then there’s a definite focus for students work now you can do this in loads of different places low states quizzes class work homework mock exams crucially anywhere where students have answered something before they know whether that answers right or wrong and crucially once they’ve marked it that feedback in terms of knowing what the right or wrong answer is has to come pretty quickly for this hyper correction effect to kick in final thing i’ll say on this dealing with the dreaded five what do i mean by this well if you have a confidence scale from one to ten kids love putting a five if your confidence scales from one to five they love putting a three because they know if they put a one it doesn’t look good but if they put a five they’re kind of setting themselves up for a bit of a fall if you find this that kids are kind of converging to the mean what i suggest you do is temporarily scrap confidence scores and just say put a star or an asterisk next to the questions the three questions you feel most confident about because that’s what we’re interested in where’s the highest level of confidence so there you go and was that a useful tip could you make use of that in your subject how would you need to tweak it to make it work for you comment below this video and i’ll say what if you do me a big favor like this video and subscribe to the tips for teachers youtube channel i’d be extremely grateful visit tipsforteachers.com uk for more stuff like this thanks so much for watching