Abstract
When responding to knowledge questions, people monitor their confidence in the knowledge they retrieve from memory and strategically regulate their responses so as to provide answers that are both correct and informative. The current study investigated the association between subjective confidence and the use of two response strategies: seeking help and withholding answers by responding “I don’t know”. Seeking help has been extensively studied as a resource management strategy in self-regulated learning, but has been largely neglected in metacognition research. In contrast, withholding answers has received less attention in educational studies than in metacognition research. Across three experiments, we compared the relationship between subjective confidence and strategy use in conditions where participants could choose between submitting answers and seeking help, between submitting and withholding answers, or between submitting answers, seeking help, and withholding answers. Results consistently showed that the association between confidence and help seeking was weaker than that between confidence and withholding answers. This difference was found for participants from two different populations, remained when participants received monetary incentives for accurate answers, and replicated across two forms of help. Our findings suggest that seeking help is guided by a wider variety of considerations than withholding answers, with some considerations going beyond improving the immediate accuracy of one’s answers. We discuss implications for research on metacognition and regarding question answering in educational and other contexts.
Highlights
In everyday life, people answer knowledge questions in various situations such as examinations, professional meetings, police interrogations, and informal conversations
In the present study, we aimed to elucidate the metacognitive processes involved in help seeking and withholding answers by testing the predictions (1) that confidence is inversely related to seeking help and withholding answers and (2) that associations with confidence are weaker for help seeking than for withholding answers
In Experiment 2, we further examined help seeking and withholding answers as metacognitive control processes by comparing the relationship between confidence and strategy use across four conditions: The help-seeking and don’t-know conditions used in Experiment 1, a combination condition where participants had both strategic options available, and a nochoice condition where participants could neither seek help nor withhold answers
Summary
People answer knowledge questions in various situations such as examinations, professional meetings, police interrogations, and informal conversations. We consider question answering from a metacognitive perspective This perspective emphasizes the importance of people’s assessments of their own cognitions (metacognitive monitoring) for self-regulation and behavior (metacognitive control; e.g., Dunlosky & Metcalfe, 2009; Fiedler et al, 2019; Koriat, 2007). In the case of answering knowledge questions, metacognitive monitoring corresponds to people’s confidence in the accuracy of the knowledge they retrieve from memory, and metacognitive control corresponds to how and how long people search their memories as well as to people’s strategic regulation of the answers they provide (for a review, see Goldsmith, 2016)
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