Natalie Kerr Lawrence et al.
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People often say that the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else.
The SPRE is designed with this notion in mind. Peer reviews can enrich students’ learn-
ing by allowing them to practice what they have learned while contributing to other
students’ learning. Reading other students’ work helps students attend to the process of
writing and develop critical reading skills that are necessary to improve their own writing.
The SPRE requires students to engage in collaboration, decision making, and formal
criticism, all of which are important complex skills that are part of critical thinking
(Halonen, 1995).
Metacognition
Both Halonen (1995) and Halpern (2002) pointed out the importance of metacognitive
skills in developing students’ critical thinking abilities. Research has shown that metacog-
nitive judgments, typically measured in the form of self-assessment items, are often at
odds with more objective measures of knowledge, skills, and abilities (Kruger & Dunning,
1999), a disparity referred to as metacognitive miscalibration. For example, Shaughnessy
(1979) measured metacognitive judgments in the form of confidence ratings students sup-
plied for each item on objective examinations in an introductory psychology class. These
data showed that examination performance and accuracy of the confidence ratings were
positively correlated, indicating that students who had lower levels of achievement showed
more metacognitive miscalibration. Sinkavich (1995) used a similar methodology to
investigate this phenomenon in students enrolled in an educational psychology class. He
found that good students (i.e., those with a final examination grade in the upper 33%)
were better able to predict what they did and did not know than poor students (i.e., those
with a final examination grade in the lower 33%).
Serdikoff, Farmer, Gilbert, Lunsford, and Noll (2004) examined metacognitive mis-
calibration with respect to writing APA-style research reports. Students in a research meth-
ods course completed four laboratory reports. The students scored their own reports using
the same evaluation form as the instructor. Serdikoff et al. then computed miscalibration
scores as the difference between the student’s self-assessment score and the instructor’s
score divided by the total points available. They also classified students into three groups
based on overall course grade—lowest, middle, and top third of performers.
Figure 3.2 shows the miscalibration scores for the three types of students on each of the
four reports. A repeated measures analysis of variance revealed that this interaction was
significant, F(2, 69) = 3.76, p = .03. Levels of miscalibration for the first report were about
the same for all students. Miscalibration decreased for the second and third report for all
students, but more so for high-level performers than for mid- or low-level performers. For
the fourth report, which was a different format (poster vs. paper), both high- and mid-
level performers showed about the same level of miscalibration as for report 3, but levels
of miscalibration for low-level performers returned to levels similar to report 1.
These data are consistent with Shaughnessy (1979), showing an association between
performance and metacognitive miscalibration. Students who earned lower scores on the
laboratory reports provided less accurate self-assessments than those who earned higher
scores. These data also are consistent with Sinkavich (1995), showing that good students