Date Approved

5-4-2004

Embargo Period

4-27-2016

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.A. in School Psychology

Department

Educational Services and Leadership

College

College of Education

Advisor

Klanderman, John

Committee Member 1

Dihoff, Roberta

Subject(s)

Learning, Psychology of; Reading comprehension

Disciplines

Educational Psychology

Abstract

The present study was designed to better our understanding of human memory acquisition and recall by investigating what role, if any, confidence plays in tasks of academic performance and attempting to provide construct validity to the concept of intent to learn and its related principles of deep processing, attention to meaning, and elaborative rehearsal. 147 participants, whose confidence was manipulated prior to testing, were placed in one of four groups: High Confidence, Low Confidence, Control, and Spelling (no intent to learn). All participants were asked to read a short story adapted from the WIAT (the Spelling group asked only to check for spelling errors), and, contrary to their belief's were all given the same set of 10 multiple-choice questions. Confidence levels were assessed with a post-test questionnaire. One-way ANOVAs and Pearson's Correlations suggest not only that confidence can be manipulated through verbal persuasion, but that a significant role exists for confidence on performance, especially with respect to low confidence, and there is a vital role for the intention to learn on acquisition and recall.

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