COLLEGE STUDENTS’ USE OF DIFFERENT STANDARDS TO EVALUATE UNDERSTANDING

Abstract

We examined college students' use of different standards to evaluate understanding by assessing their detection of lexical problems (lexical standard), falsehoods (external consistency standard), and inconsistent information in texts (internal consistency standard). Students' academic ranking was related to their evaluation performance for lexical and external consistency standards but not for the internal consistency standard. Under instructions, which did not alert students to the nature of problems they would encounter, students used an external consistency standard to evaluate understanding more than they used an internal consistency or lexical standard. Alerting students to the necessity for using all three standards to detect errors improved their performance on all problem types but students were less able to detect inconsistent textual information than other problems. Students generally rated passage understanding high regardless of their performance, experiencing illusion of knowing. Academic ranking was related to the amount of illusion of knowing experienced. Results are discussed in terms of the consequences of inadequate evaluation and self‐assessments for college students' comprehension and memory of texts.