Do Students Know if They Answered Particular Questions Correctly on a Psychology Exam?

The current study explores students' abilities to make different metacognitive judgments about the same material. Sophomores in a psychology class indicated how confident they were that each answer on their final was correct (micro-level judgments) and pre- postdicted their overall score (macro-level judgments). Students made the series of simpler micro-level metacognitive judgments "Did I answer a particular question correctly" more effectively than the more complex macro-level judgments pre- postdicting "What will be/was my overall exam score?" Data indicate that when assessing performance on the same exam, different metacognitive tasks produce different success rates. In addition, there was a significant tendency for students to assign higher confidence ratings to their correct answers, but no significant tendency to assign lower confidence ratings to their incorrect answers. (Contains 3 tables.)