PSYCHOLOGY MASTER'S THESIS ABSTRACT

Karen Suzanne Beck
MA-Research
May 2001

Adolescent General Knowledge Assessment: Exploring Differences in Mutual Knowledge Judgments

    The current study was designed to explore adolescents’ abilities to assess what they know, what others know and to examine their accuracy in making such judgments.  A forced-choice survey was used to assess adolescent participants’ general-knowledge, their confidence in their estimates of their own knowledge, the knowledge of their peers, and their confidence in their assessments of their peers’ knowledge.  As predicted, adolescents in this study were not accurate in their assessments of either their own or their classmates’ knowledge.  The current study predicted that adolescents would show an overconfidence bias both in assessments of their own knowledge and in that of others.  However, in contrast to both previous findings and to this study’s prediction, adolescent participants showed an overall under-confidence bias in both their own knowledge and that of their peers.  When an apparent Item Difficulty by Accuracy interaction was further examined, participants’ responses indicated an overconfidence bias for difficult items and an under-confidence bias for easier items.  Similar hard-easy effects have been found in previous knowledge assessment studies.

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