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05/10/2008
Or, I could be entirely wrong.
It's fascinating (yet not surprising) that confidence doesn't correlate with correctness at all. In fact, when a professor teaching a Cognitive Psych class showed us some studies published in educational psychology journals that suggested a negative correlation between learner confidence and learner correctness, I wanted to jump up out of my seat and wave the studies in the faces of those "self-esteem philosophy" advocates who prefer feel-good teaching to methods of teaching that actually allow learners to, well, learn.
Harriet Hall offers a nice summary of this concept in her review of On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not, which will most likely be my book-of-choice for a 12-hour train ride I'll be taking early next month.
Though I wish the commenters on the Science Based Medicine blog would stop hatin' on postmodernism. ::sniffle:: ;)
09:50 Permalink | Comments (3) | Email this | Tags: educational psychology, confidence, self-esteem
Comments
Self-efficacy (or predicting how you will do on a specific problem, for instance) matters, but domain-general person-wide self-esteem is feel-good nonsense.
Posted by: Dan tdaxp | 05/11/2008
Dan,
I think that the pop-psych proponents have flipped causation on its head: a learner is supposed to gain some measure of confidence (and ability to predict how (s)he'll do on a problem, i.e. understand his or her own limitations) from actually completing tasks successfully; it's not the case that a learner will complete a task successfully if (s)he generally feels good about him or herself.
And I definitely agree that believing you're special doesn't mean you'll be able to pass a calculus test. :)
Posted by: PrimroseRoad | 05/11/2008
"a negative correlation between learner confidence and learner correctness"
As the mother of a teenager, I can relate to this
Posted by: squib | 05/11/2008