Do Confidence Ratings Reactively Modify Children’s Academic Assessment Performance? Negative Answer from a Three-Year Longitudinal Study

The reactivity effect of metacognitive judgments on first-order task performance has received increased research attention. Previous studies showed that soliciting retrospective confidence ratings (CRs) reactively enhances task performance itself, such as performance in decision making and reasoning tasks, especially for those with high self-confidence. It remains unknown whether CRs can improve students’ academic assessment performance in real educational settings. The current study recruited 795 fourth-grade elementary school children to explore if making CRs reactively affects students’ academic assessment performance in two main subjects (i.e., Chinese Language and Mathematics). The data were collected across six waves with half-year intervals. From Wave 2, children either provided (CR group) or did not provide CRs (no-CR group) when completing standardized academic assessments. The results showed Bayesian evidence supporting the claim that making CRs does not influence children’s academic assessment performance (both the average performance across waves 2–6 and the performance in each wave) in both subjects. Furthermore, children’s self-confidence did not moderate the reactive influence of CRs. The results from multilevel regression analyses re-confirmed the above conclusions. Possible explanations for the absence of the reactivity effect of CRs on children’s academic assessment performance are discussed.