On Students' (Mis)judgments of Learning and Teaching Effectiveness

Students' judgments of their own learning are often misled by intuitive yet false ideas about how people learn. In educational settings, learning experiences that minimize effort and increase the appearance of fluency, engagement, and enthusiasm often inflate students' estimates of their own learning, but do not always enhance their actual learning. We review the research on these "illusions of learning," how they can mislead students' evaluations of the effectiveness of their instructors, and how students' evaluations of teaching effectiveness can be biased by factors unrelated to teaching. We argue that the heavy reliance on student evaluations of teaching in decisions about faculty hiring and promotion might encourage teaching practices that boost students' subjective ratings of teaching effectiveness, but do not enhance-and may even undermine-students' learning and their development of metacognitive skills. General Audience Summary As the changing landscape of education provides more freedom and flexibility in the options available to students, it is becoming increasingly important that students be able to successfully evaluate and manage their own learning. This is easier said than done, however, because students often misjudge their own learning of a given topic to be better than it actually is. This common tendency toward overconfidence can be further bolstered by a number of intuitive but misleading factors that enhance students' subjective impressions of how much they have learned, without always enhancing their actual learning. Students believe, for example, that they learn best from enthusiastic and engaging instructors who provide smooth and well-polished lectures that do not require active class participation. Such factors, although they readily inflate students' judgments of their own learning, do not consistently enhance students' actual learning. They also inflate students' evaluations of the effectiveness of their instructors. Indeed, students' evaluations of teaching effectiveness can be poor predictors of their actual learning in their courses, and these evaluations can be biased by external factors unrelated to student learning, such as an instructor's gender, age, attractiveness, and grading leniency. Given the heavy reliance on student evaluations of teaching effectiveness in decisions regarding faculty hiring and promotion, faculty may be incentivized to adopt teaching approaches that boost their evaluations but do not enhance-and co