Secondary school science students' calibration of their grade in a written test: The effect of sex

Abstract

During the last decades, important sex differences have been found in the context of science education. Besides, self-assessment is crucial to the cycle of self-regulated learning and, consequently, to students' performance. The main goal of the present investigation is to analyze secondary school students' metacognition and, in particular, the effect of gender. To this aim, a sample of 487 students took part in our study. Our analyses show that girls are more accurate than boys in their predictions, despite the latter being more confident. A general tendency towards overestimations has been found for both sexes. Moreover, high-achieving students tend to be more precise and underestimate their performance, while low-achieving students tend to be less precise and overestimate their grade in the test. Although this effect was found in both sexes, the effect size was larger in the case of girls. In light of the results, high-achieving students make a better use of self-generated feedback than low-achievers. Sex differences in calibration could be explained by the different attitudes and motivations of boys and girls towards science.