“I’m going to smash that exam!”
“I don’t need to plan - I know what I need to do.”
“This will be easy; we did the Peasant’s Revolt last year.”
On the whole, confidence is seen as a positive thing. Whether it’s a pupil standing up in front of their peers to give a speech or strutting across the stage in the school play, we generally view it as a quality to be encouraged.
In fact, when we think about confidence in the classroom, it’s usually only to consider how we can boost the confidence of pupils who are struggling.
But how often do we consider the threat posed by pupils who have too much confidence?
Obviously, the type of confidence that allows someone to deliver a presentation without fear does not typically threaten their learning. Where problems occur is when pupils’ confidence causes them to overestimate their existing knowledge and understanding.
This overconfidence often becomes apparent when pupils make statements like, “We’ve done this, Miss!”, “I know this already, Sir!”, or “I reckon I did great on that exam!” - only for them to later find out that they actually did rather badly.
Overestimating your learning
A new meta-analysis, by Mengtian Xia and colleagues, has shown that pupils of all ages routinely overestimate their ability to complete most tasks. Overall, the researchers found that children tended to overestimate their performance by about a third.
If we apply this to the classroom, consider the implications of your pupils routinely thinking that they are learning more than they are.
If pupils are overestimating their performance, they are less likely to sustain the levels of effort required to make progress. An overconfident Year 5 writer is less likely to plan or check their work for accuracy, while an overconfident GCSE pupil is less likely to put in the hours of revision needed to reach their potential.
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While teachers don’t want to dampen enthusiasm and positivity, it’s important that they nip overconfidence in the bud before it begins to hold pupils back.
Thankfully, there are some practical approaches that can help to dampen overconfidence, while also improving pupils’ chances of succeeding in difficult tasks.
1. Practise forecasting
Pupils often find it difficult to accurately predict their future performance, but with a complicated task, such as writing a history essay, we can use structured nudges to scaffold pupils in forecasting how they will do.
For instance, ask pupils to list the aspects of writing the essay that they are likely to do well on and the aspects that they might find more difficult. This helps them to appraise the task more critically, factoring in the potential challenges.
This strategy involves much more than pupils just predicting their grade or score. It is promoting self-evaluation and can alter pupils’ confidence levels by helping them to take a realistic view of what the task requires of them.
2. Compare multiple worked examples
Too often, teachers will model a great response to an exam question or another piece of work, and pupils will understandably try to imitate that skilled example.
This sets the bar too high, and encourages pupils to overestimate both what is expected of them and what they can realistically produce.
So, instead of selecting one great example as a model, choose two or three examples of varying quality, and get pupils to critically compare them.
By probing strengths and comparing flaws, we encourage pupils to appraise likely mistakes and pitfalls before they get a chance to make them.
3. Explicitly teach metacognitive strategies
Metacognitive strategies - which get pupils to think about their learning - are useful for helping pupils to plan, monitor and evaluate their own performance as they are working through a task.
For instance, pupils might know that essays require planning, but might not know that there are a range of strategies that can help them to do this.
Teachers need to explicitly teach pupils about the strategies that are available to them, then deliberately guide them in selecting and applying their chosen strategies.
This Education Endowment Foundation animation does a great job of explaining the process.
