## Key Ideas > [!abstract] Core Concepts > > - **Unskilled individuals overestimate abilities**: Limited knowledge prevents accurate self-assessment of competence > - **Cannot recognise expert performance**: Without understanding mastery, students cannot calibrate skill level > - **Self-report unreliable for assessment**: Student confidence often inversely related to actual understanding ## Definition **Dunning-Kruger Effect**: Cognitive bias where relatively unskilled individuals overestimate their skill level within a particular area, arising because they lack knowledge needed for accurate calibration. ## Connected To [[Curse of Knowledge]] | [[Check For Understanding]] | [[Formative Assessment]] | [[Culture of Error]] | [[Experts and Novices Think Differently]] --- ## The assessment problem The Dunning-Kruger effect creates difficulties in education: students are poor judges of their own understanding when accurate self-assessment matters most (Kruger & Dunning, 1999). Without knowing what expert performance looks like, individuals cannot recognise they lack expertise. Kruger and Dunning (1999) demonstrated across four studies that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of grammar, logic, and humour overestimated their abilities, rating themselves at the 62nd percentile on average when they actually performed at the 12th percentile. This overconfidence stemmed not from general overconfidence but from the specific metacognitive skills required to recognise competence in that domain (Ehrlinger, Johnson, Banner, Dunning, & Kruger, 2008). This creates divergent trajectories: **More knowledgeable student**: Can identify gaps in understanding, seeks clarification from teacher, receives targeted instruction, continues developing. **Less knowledgeable student**: Won't realise the problem exists, won't seek clarification, continues with flawed understanding that becomes increasingly entrenched. The students who most need help are least likely to ask for it. ## Teaching implications The Dunning-Kruger effect undermines reliance on student self-assessment (Kruger & Dunning, 1999): Student reflection on how well they understand a concept bears little relation to their actual understanding. Confidence and competence are not correlated for novices (Dunning, Johnson, Ehrlinger, & Kruger, 2003). **Poor assessment approaches that enable the effect**: - "Do you understand?" / "Does this make sense?" (invites false confidence) - "Are you happy with this?" / "Any questions?" (silence doesn't indicate understanding) - Students nodding or appearing confident (performance, not competence) - Student self-ratings of understanding (systematically unreliable for novices) **Effective alternatives**: Ask specific questions testing actual understanding rather than perceived understanding. Use [[Check For Understanding]] techniques like [[Mini-Whiteboards]] that reveal everyone's thinking, not just confident volunteers who may or may not understand. Research demonstrates that metacognitive monitoring accuracy improves with domain expertise (Miller & Geraci, 2011). Novices lack the conceptual frameworks necessary to evaluate their own performance accurately, whilst experts possess the knowledge structures that enable accurate self-assessment (Chi, Feltovich, & Glaser, 1981). This metacognitive development occurs gradually through instruction and practice (Flavell, 1979). The inverse of the Dunning-Kruger Effect is the [[Curse of Knowledge]]: experts struggle to remember what it's like not to know something, whilst novices struggle to recognise what they don't know. Both create assessment challenges from opposite directions. ## References Chi, M. T. H., Feltovich, P. J., & Glaser, R. (1981). Categorization and representation of physics problems by experts and novices. *Cognitive Science*, 5(2), 121-152. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog0502_2 Dunning, D., Johnson, K., Ehrlinger, J., & Kruger, J. (2003). Why people fail to recognize their own incompetence. *Current Directions in Psychological Science*, 12(3), 83-87. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.01235 Ehrlinger, J., Johnson, K., Banner, M., Dunning, D., & Kruger, J. (2008). Why the unskilled are unaware: Further explorations of (absent) self-insight among the incompetent. *Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes*, 105(1), 98-121. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2007.05.002 Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive-developmental inquiry. *American Psychologist*, 34(10), 906-911. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.34.10.906 Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology*, 77(6), 1121-1134. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1121 Miller, T. M., & Geraci, L. (2011). Training metacognition in the classroom: The influence of incentives and feedback on exam predictions. *Metacognition and Learning*, 6(3), 303-314. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11409-011-9083-7 ---