How do you decide whether you did well on a test?

As a parent, it is sometimes frustrating to talk to your kids about exams.  There are times when they will come home convinced that they did really well on a test only to be disappointed when the results come in.  Other times, they feel like they did quite poorly on the test and are pleasantly surprised that they scored better than they expected.  

How do people judge how well they did on a test after taking it?

This question was explored in a paper by Yana Weinstein and Roddy Roediger in the April, 2010 issue of Memory & Cognition.  They had students take tests of general knowledge questions.  Some of the questions on these tests were easy (What is the name of Tarzan’s girlfriend?).  Some of the questions were more difficult (The general named Hannibal was from what city?)  There were 50 questions on the test.

This study examined a number of different factors that might affect people’s judgments about how easy a test was including whether people could choose how many questions they wanted to answer or were forced to answer all of them, and the way that the question about test accuracy was asked.  Most of these factors had little or no consistent influence on people’s judgments of how well they did on the test.

The one factor that had a consistent effect was the ordering of the questions on the test.  When the test had the easiest questions at the beginning and the harder ones at the end, people felt like they did better on the test than when the questions were randomly ordered.  When the test had the hard questions first and then the easy ones, people actually felt like they did worse than when the questions were randomly ordered. 

Of particular interest in these results is that when the easy questions were first, people actually judged that they got more questions right than they actually did.  So the easy-to-hard ordering made people overconfident in their performance.

Why does this happen?  The authors suggest two reasons for the observed results.  First, the effect appears most strongly when people are looking back on their performance rather than when they make judgments as they are performing the test.  Research on memory finds that items that are seen early in a list are remembered better than those seen late in the list.  So, if you look back on a test, you are most likely to remember items from early in the test.  If those items are easy, then that will give you the impression that you did well overall.

Second, people often enter a test with a rough sense of how well they are going to do.  For example, if you have not prepared well for a test, you may think you are going to do poorly.  If the test starts with a number of easy questions, you may be pleasantly surprised at your performance and adjust your belief upward.  If the test starts with a number of hard questions, you may adjust your belief downward.

So, why does this matter? 

Perhaps the most important issue is one of motivation.  If your performance on an exam is worse than you thought it would be after taking the test, it can be demoralizing.  It is important to remember that your actual performance on a test is only one factor that helps you figure out how well you did.  As this work shows, the ordering of the questions matters as well.  It is no fun getting a poor grade on a test, of course, but don’t compound the disappointment by being upset that you thought you had done better. 

Video games make a lousy gift.

Because it is back-to-school time, it is interesting to think a bit about another drain on kids’ time—video games.  What role video games have on kids’ performance in school? 

There is a lot of correlational evidence suggesting that video games are bad for schoolwork.  That is, kids who play lots of video games tend to do more poorly in school than kids who do not play that often.

Correlational studies are the most obvious studies to do to address this question, because it is straightforward to get information about school performance about a group of children and then find out from their parents how often they play video games at home.  Of course, the problem with correlational studies is that there are many factors that could be causing the results that go beyond what was measured.  Maybe the kids who play the most video games at home have the least parental supervision, and so they don’t do well in school.  Maybe the kids who are struggling most in school are the ones who seek out video games as a way to escape the frustration of homework.

A nice study in the April, 2010 issue of Psychological Science by Robert Weis and Brittany Cerankosky tackles this issue head-on.  They found a sample of boys between the ages of 6 and 9 who did not yet own a video game system, but whose parents were planning to buy them one in the near future. 

They got information about reading, writing, and math performance in school about all the boys as well as information from parents and teachers about behavior at home and at school.  Two groups of boys were created.  The groups were set up so that their current level of school performance was about the same. 

One group of the boys was given a PS2 game system and three age-appropriate games.  The other group did not get a game system.  After four months, the researchers got information about current reading and math performance, behavior, and an assessment from the parents about how the kids were spending their time.

Reading and writing performance of the boys given the PS2 was significantly worse than that of the boys who did not get the game system.  There were no statistically reliable differences in math performance. 

Other statistical analysis found that the difference in reading performance could be explained by the amount of time that the boys spent playing video games each week.

Why was language performance hurt, but not math performance?  Between the ages of 6 and 9, there are many opportunities for kids to get extra practice with language.  Just having a conversation with parents can improve language use.  In addition, kids can sit at the dinner table and read a book.  Parents can spend some time reading to their children.  The video games cut into this unstructured reading time.  There aren’t as many opportunities to practice math outside of doing schoolwork directly, and so math performance was not hurt. 

What about behavior?  There was a tendency for the kids who got the video games to exhibit more behavior problems in school than those who did not get the games.  This difference was small, but it should be of some concern, because the boys in this study had only had the games for about 4 months when the follow-up measures were taken.  These initial differences could get larger over time.

What does this mean?

The problem here is probably not the video games themselves.  The problem is that video games are very enticing.  Kids can sit and play video games for many hours.  In that time, they engage in few real conversations with others, and so they end up with much less practice reading and using language. 

As a parent, I know how hard it is to resist buying a video game system for your kids.  Obviously, if there is no game system in the house, that will limit the amount of time that your kids play games.  If you do decide to buy a game system, then it is important to have strict limits on the amount of time that it gets played to leave enough time for the kinds of interactions that enhance learning.

Why girls drop math I: Beliefs about Math

Here in Texas, it may be 105 degrees, but marching band practice started, and there have been orientations at my kids’ schools, so it must be time for them to go back.  That got me thinking about a big problem in math and science education.  In elementary school, boys and girls are about even in their performance in math and science.  By middle school, girls start to lag behind, and few women go on to pursue math in college.  What is going on?

There are lots of answers to this question, but I’ll explore a few over the next week.  Think of this as the back-to-school portion of the blog.

One factor that leads girls to drop math is that boys and girls seem to differ in their beliefs about math.  Psychologist Carol Dweck (author of the fantastic book Mindset) argues that people can have two different sets of beliefs (or mindsets) toward academic topics.  

Entity theorists treat academic topics as if they were talents.  You either have them or you don’t.  So, you could be good at math or bad at math.  If you’re good at math, then you’ll learn it.  If you’re bad at math, then at some point, you’ll reach a type of math that goes beyond your abilities.

Incremental theorists treat math as a skill to be acquired.  Stick with math, and eventually you’ll get even the really hard stuff.

Dweck and her colleagues find that people who treat math (or any other academic subject) as a skill will stick with it longer and try harder when it gets difficult than when they treat it as a talent. 

The way this affects boys and girls is that Dweck has collected evidence that boys and girls get different feedback about math from early on in their schooling.  Eventually, everyone hits a topic in math that they struggle with.  When talking to girls, teachers are likely to emphasize that math is hard.  Talking about math as being difficult makes it sound like something that either you can do or you can’t.

Boys tend to get feedback that treats math as a skill to be acquired.  When they hit a hard topic, they are told to try harder and they’ll eventually get it. 

Because girls are more likely than boys to get feedback that treats math as a talent, they are more likely to end up with an entity theory of math.  The truly hard stuff in math comes in middle school, when kids are first exposed to algebra and geometry and later trigonometry and calculus.  Eventually, one of these topics is going to derail everyone, at least for a while.  Because of their beliefs about math, then, girls are more likely than boys to conclude that they have reached the limits of their talent and give up.

That isn’t the whole story, of course, and I’ll pick up on this in my next post.