Exploring the asymmetry of metacognition

People in general and students in particular have a tendency to misinterpret their own abilities. Some tend to underestimate their skills, while others tend to overestimate them. This paper investigates the degree to which metacognition is asymmetric in real-world learning and examines the change of a students' confidence over the course of a semester and its impact on the students' academic performance. Our findings, conducted using 129,644 students learning in eight courses within the LearnSmart platform, indicate that poor or unrealistic metacognition is asymmetric. These students are biased in one direction: they are more likely to be overconfident than underconfident. Additionally, while the examination of the temporal aspects of confidence reveals no significant change throughout the semester, changes are more apparent in the first and the last few weeks of the course. More specifically, there is a sharp increase in underconfidence and a simultaneous decrease in realistic evaluation toward the end of the semester. Finally, both overconfidence and underconfidence seem to be correlated with students' overall course performance. An increase in overconfidence is related to higher overall performance, while an increase in underconfidence is associated with lower overall performance.