Learning, Remembering, Believing Enhancing Human Performance (1994) / Chapter Skim
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Illusions of Comprehension, Competence, and Remembering
Illusions of Comprehension, Competence, and Remembering
Pages 57-80
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From page 57... ...
They must decide if they are prepared for an upcoming test. In order to allocate study time, they must monitor the state of their own learning and comprehension across the topics for which they are responsible.
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From page 58... ...
Students may be confident that they understood a chapter yet do poorly on a test of the material in it; they may have confidence in their memories of studying much of the weekend, while a more objective record showed otherwise; and they may have confidence in their judgment that a given instructor is a great teacher, while a more objective measure revealed that students are learning little in that instructor's course. Even in the face of such discrepancies between subjective experience and objective measures, however, people find subjective experience a compelling basis for judgment.
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From page 59... ...
Errors resulting from reliance on subjective experience provide convincing support for a subjectivist tradition. Cognitive illusions that reflect effects of past experience on current subjective experience are analogous to perceptual illusions.
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From page 60... ...
argue that a variety of anomalies in social judgment and prediction stems from variations in how particular people construe a situation, and their failure to appreciate that their construal is only one of many possibilities. The "false consensus effect" in social judgment refers to people's tendency to overestimate the commonness of their own beliefs and choices (Ross et al., 1977~.
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From page 61... ...
These effects occur even though subjects cannot "remember" or are unaware of the relevance of the priming stimulus. Construal of a current situation is often determined by small details that make the current situation analogous to a particular past experience.
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From page 62... ...
Prior reading of those words led to faster solution of those anagrams. However, subjects continued to use their subjective experience of difficulty as a basis for judging difficulty for others, even though their experience had been affected by the effects of prior reading of the solution words.
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From page 63... ...
When people were given the answers to puzzles and problems and asked to "go through the motions of solving the puzzle just as if you didn't already know the solution," he found that they vastly underestimated the time it would take to solve the problem in comparison with a group that actually attempted to solve it. This hindsight effect could lead teachers who rely on their own subjective experience of understanding as a basis for judging the difficulty of problems to judge their students as dull and slow.
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From page 64... ...
One objective basis for judgments is a theory. In the case of the anagram experiments described above, subjects who had read the solutions to anagrams in the first phase and then realized that their subjective experience of difficulty was a poor basis for judging difficulty for others, could have switched over to analytic judgments based on some theory of what makes an anagram easy or difficult.
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From page 65... ...
However, results were the opposite when subjects were given the same patterns of successes and failures of others and asked to evaluate their abilities. In that case, a performer with a descending success rate was judged as more intelligent and expected to outperform a performer with an ascending success rate.
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From page 66... ...
Unfortunately, judgments of learning are surprisingly inaccurate under certain conditions. For example, subjects might study a list of unrelated paired associates, such as ocean-tree, and then be asked to predict the probability of their being able to recall tree to the cue ocean on a memory test a short time later.
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From page 67... ...
When the to-be-recalled target word was shown to subjects, they, like the subjects who were presented the answer to an anagram along with the anagram, could apparently no longer judge the likelihood that they would have been able to come up with the answer on their own. Giving the target word paired with the cue word at a delay appears to ruin subjects' subjective experience in a fashion analogous to that experienced by subjects in the anagram experiments.
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From page 68... ...
The students' subjective experience of greater clarity may be a misattribution of effects due to their improved understanding of the subject; the speech habits of the lecturer may be completely unchanged. The subjective experience of greater clarity of speech may depend on increased ease of comprehension, analogous to the influence of memory on noise judgments, as discussed below.
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From page 69... ...
For example, Reder and Ritter (1992) found that when exposure to parts of problems requiring arithmetical calculation were manipulated along with prior exposure to answers for the problems, it was frequency of exposure to parts that increased the feeling of knowing (see also Schwartz and Metcalfe, 1992, who obtained analogous results in subjects' memory for cue-target word pairs)
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From page 70... ...
Results showed that subjects were well calibrated across domains; physics students, for example, were more likely to correctly predict that they could verify inferences from a physics text than were music students. More interesting, within a domain, expertise was inversely related to calibration, that is, experts were more confident than they should have been.
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From page 71... ...
There are many manipulations that speed the rate of improvement in performance during training such as massing practice, providing very frequent feedback, and keeping the conditions of practice constant- that are among the very worst training conditions in terms of long-term retention and the ability to transfer or generalize training to altered conditions and tasks. Conversely, certain manipulations that appear to introduce difficulties for the learner, slowing the apparent acquisition of the skills and knowledge to be learned such as spacing practice sessions on a given subtask, provid
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From page 72... ...
They had postal workers in Britain learn keyboard skills under varying conditions of the spacing of practice sessions. Consistent with the results of laboratory studies going back decades, they found that the more distributed in time were the practice sessions, the more efficient the learning per session.
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From page 73... ...
Not only did the subjects who received random practice perform much better than blocked-practice subjects when tested under random conditions, they also performed better when the final criterion test was carried out under blocked conditions! Recently, Hall et al.
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From page 74... ...
As in the Shea and Morgan (1979) study, random practice not only yielded better performance on a retention test carried out under random conditions, it also yielded better performance on the blocked criterion test.
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From page 75... ...
Subjects misattributed their ease of hearing the old sentences to a lowering of the intensity of the background noise. Past experiences may be a pervasive source of unconscious influences on subjective experience, and, in turn, on judgments based on subjective experience.
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From page 76... ...
was briefly flashed on the screen, so briefly that subjects were unaware that any character string had been presented. For both old and new words on the recognition memory test, a matching context word increased the probability of judging an item old, while a mismatching word decreased the probability of judging the item old.
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From page 77... ...
In a second condition, the matching or mismatching context words were presented for much longer so that subjects were fully aware of them. When subjects were aware of the context words, they were actually less likely to call either an old or a new recognition test word old when the context word matched the test word than when no context word or a mismatch context word was presented.
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From page 78... ...
Subjects were most confident that they were remembering when they had vivid visual imagery for the event. However, just as perceptual and conceptual fluency on a memory test can be manipulated to produce illusions of memory, the vividness of images and the ease of elaborating on a "memory" can be manipulated and so create illusions of remembering.
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From page 79... ...
Instead, the feeling of remembering depends on a particular interpretation of evidence, such as the ease of generating images, the vividness of those images, and the social support for the "memory." People can mistake memories of imagined events or fictional events for events that really happened to them, and they can mistake current imagining for remembering. memory of abuse also suggest that people give up CONCLUSIONS In our previous book, we concluded (Druckman and Bjork, 1991:47~: The effectiveness of a training program should be measured not by the speed of acquisition of a task during training or by the level of performance reached at the end of training, but, rather, by learner's performance in the posttraining tasks and real-world settings that are the target of training.
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From page 80... ...
The effects of memory can be misattributed to the characteristics of a present situation and give rise to unconscious plagiarism, mistakes in evaluating the level of comprehension of one's students, and so forth. The effects of factors that influence fluency, in turn, can be misattributed and experienced as remembering, such as the false recovery of a "memory." Much like the person who taps a song, everyone lives in a world that is, in part, of his or her own making, not realizing that subjective experience might rest on a misconstrual of the current situation.
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