The illusion of mastery: a danger for learning

Illusion of mastery: a discrepancy between the impression of knowing and actually knowing.

We tend to think we are very good judges of the effectiveness of our learning and our level of knowledge mastery [1]. Yet we often find ourselves unable to explain a concept during a conversation, even though we were certain we had mastered its meaning. This situation shows that we can be subject to illusions of mastery — in other words, "thinking we know". But where does this discrepancy between the impression of knowing and actually knowing come from?

"That rings a bell": how to distinguish familiarity from mastery

Metacognition, which can be defined as the ability to be aware of our own thoughts, is also at work when we learn new information or revise a course. This process is essential as it allows us to distinguish what we know from what we do not know. The problem is that, when judging our knowledge and gaps without objective assessment, our metacognition relies mainly on our subjective experience ("I think I know my course") rather than on our actual level.

For example, to assess our level of mastery in the first instance, we rely on our sense of familiarity with the content to be learned [2]. This sense of familiarity can give us an illusion of mastery, because it creates the impression that the information is in memory — even though it is not. This is typically what happens when we read a course repeatedly on an e-learning platform or elsewhere, or copy it out to learn it: the information becomes increasingly familiar, gradually creating the illusion that we have fully mastered its meaning [3, 4]. But the risk is that the information is processed only superficially and is never durably anchored in memory. When faced with a multiple-choice question where all options have subtle differences, all will seem familiar yet we will be quite unable to choose the correct answer.

There can therefore be a genuine dissociation between a strong sense of familiarity and actual mastery.

"I knew it!": is recognising the same as knowing?

Another phenomenon that reflects this discrepancy is the hindsight bias [5]. It refers to the tendency to believe we always knew a piece of information we have just discovered. Here, the level of mastery is higher than mere familiarity: faced with a multiple-choice question, we immediately spot the correct answer. But if we had been asked the question without the answer in front of us, we would have been unable to retrieve it. What we lack is the ability to voluntarily retrieve information when it has not been sufficiently mastered.

This also occurs when we revise with the answer key in front of us. Reading the answers can give a false sense of mastery, because the information is available without any retrieval effort. Here, simply recognising information can create an illusion about our mastery of a concept.

Cognitive science thus allows us to realise that judging our own level of mastery is very difficult! A sense of confidence can mislead us into thinking we know something, and our metacognition — which is ordinarily our greatest ally in distinguishing what we know from what we do not — can also lead us astray.

To bring metacognition back to reason and avoid the illusion of mastery, nothing beats an objective assessment that tests the actual ability to retrieve and use information (see our article on designing a successful assessment). It is therefore preferable to avoid as much as possible certain learning methods such as cramming, which rely simply on familiarisation or recognition [6], and to favour instead methods that establish strong memory anchoring, such as repeated self-testing (see our article on ways to avoid the illusion of mastery).

To effectively overcome the illusion of mastery, let us keep in mind that being familiar does not necessarily mean knowing, and recognising does not always go hand in hand with understanding. Cognitive science research gives us keys to reduce this illusion of mastery.

It is precisely because it draws on recommendations from cognitive science research that the Didask LMS makes it easy to design "anti-illusion-of-mastery" modules, by offering pedagogical formats adapted to this cognitive challenge.

Laure Duchamp and Alice Latimier

REFERENCES

[1] Bembenutty, H. (2009). Feeling-of-Knowing Judgment and Self-Regulation of Learning. Education. 129 (4), 589.
[2] Jacoby LL, Kelley CM, Dywan J. (1989). Memory attributions. In Varieties of Memory and Consciousness: Essays in Honour of Endel Tulving, ed. H Roediger, FM Craik, pp. 391–422. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
[3] Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make It Stick. Harvard University Press. (Chapter 5: "Avoid illusions of knowing").
[4] Bjork, R. A., Dunlosky, J., & Kornell, N. (2013). Self-regulated learning: Beliefs, techniques, and illusions. Annual review of psychology. 64, 417–444.
[5] Fischhoff B. (1975). Hindsight is not equal to foresight: the effects of outcome knowledge on judgment under uncertainty. J. Exp. Psychol.: Hum. Percept. Perform. 1:288–99
[6] Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.