As the days lengthen and spring approaches, thoughts move to our students’ summer exams. And we all hope that they will manage the inevitable pressures of national tests by revising with spirit and skill. Yet, research evidence reveals a flaw in the whole process: our students’ self-assurance.

Overconfidence at revision time is part of a big issue at every age and key stage. It occurs when youngsters poorly judge their own learning and memory performance. Ample research on what is termed “judgements of learning” - our ability to accurately judge how well and how much we have learned - reveals this fundamental glitch in our thinking. Effectively, we are tricked by our own brains into mistaking feeling good with learning more.

We know from a large-scale meta-analysis that students often struggle to deploy the most effective study strategies. In 2013, John Dunlosky and colleagues revealed that using highlighters and rereading notes gave students a false sense of confidence. Their fluent study felt good to them, but it didn’t work well compared with more challenging strategies, such as self-testing.

From young children to experienced university students, we consistently con ourselves into thinking our independent study is effective. Cognitive-science studies reveal how we trick ourselves. Research by Yang, Huang and Shanks (2017) reveals how even the size of font can fool us. By making reading easier, quicker and subtly more fluent, a bigger font size can affect our “judgement of learning”.

Not only does the “font-size effect” reveal our faulty thinking, Dunlosky and Michael L Mueller (2016) showed that when students believed a coloured font was associated with enhanced memory, they then judged their performance and learning to be superior. Unsurprisingly, their overconfidence was unfounded and no difference could be detected in their final test performance.

Our students will soon be undertaking revision in earnest. As they do so, we must help them to puncture their natural overconfidence. By recommending well-researched strategies, such as self-testing and quizzing, we can help them to recalibrate their judgement.

Of course, supporting students to be independent learners requires a lot of teacher guidance and scaffolding. So perhaps we need to puncture our own overconfidence in thinking that we have prepared our students to revise so effectively. Students need help to self-regulate and override the faults in their cognitive architecture. Resources such as “exam wrappers” can be a useful, evidence-informed tool to improve students’ judgement during the crucial revision period. By requesting that they self-report their revision preparation, and to report their confidence levels, we can help them more accurately to calibrate their efforts.

So, as summer exam series begins to loom large, we should shine a light on the problem that can hamper revision: overconfident judgements of learning.

Alex Quigley is a senior associate for the Education Endowment Foundation, a former teacher, and author of Closing the Vocabulary Gap

This article originally appeared in the 15 March 2019 issue under the headline “Too self-assured to succeed”