When accuracy does not make a difference—The relationship between future teachers’ self-assessment accuracy, quality of learning material and subsequent topical interest

Abstract Future teachers rely not only on understanding content and methods for teaching in their professional education, but also on being able to successfully implement them in their teaching. While self-assessments of future teachers’ understanding have been found to enable self-regulated learning, it is unclear how the accuracy of these self-assessments actually affects the quality of the learning material they generate for their students. Therefore, we examined the relevance of self-assessment accuracy for the quality of self-generated learning material, with a particular focus on worked examples, in the field of mathematics. Two groups of future teachers, student teachers ( n = 38) and teacher candidates of mathematics ( n = 35) were tested on their method knowledge concerning the construction of worked examples and on content knowledge about the Pythagorean theorem. Subsequently, they provided confidence judgments regarding their test performance. They then implemented their knowledge by designing their own worked examples for potential students. They could choose to further engage with the study content after having designed the learning material. Using multiple regression analyses, we found that test performance was predictive of the quality of worked examples, but different measures of self-assessment accuracy of knowledge were not. The subsequent topical interest could not be predicted by measures of self-assessment accuracy, either. We discuss implications of our findings for the relevance of self-assessment accuracy in teacher education and in teachers’ professional practice.