Calibrate your confidence against real testing

Test yourself to find out what you actually know, not what you feel you know.

Why it works

Your sense of knowing is built largely from fluency — how familiar and smooth material feels — which is a poor proxy for whether you can produce it on demand. Testing replaces that feeling with hard data: a wrong answer is direct, unignorable evidence that your confidence was miscalibrated, and repeated tests gradually tune your self-judgment to reality.

How to do it

1. Before testing, predict how much you will get right.
2. Test yourself by recall, not recognition, and score it honestly.
3. Compare your prediction to the result and adjust where you were overconfident.

Evidence

Research on metacognition and judgments of learning finds that learners are routinely overconfident, and that testing and feedback improve the accuracy of their self-assessment over rereading, which inflates confidence without improving recall. A large review of learning techniques rates practice testing among the highest-utility strategies, and a distribution-based model explains why: retrieval attempts sharpen the split between what is genuinely learned and what only feels familiar. (rct)

Calibration improves with feedback but rarely becomes perfect; people remain somewhat overconfident, so testing is a correction, not a cure.

Sources

• Bjork, R. A., Dunlosky, J., & Kornell, N. (2013). Self-Regulated Learning: Beliefs, Techniques, and Illusions. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 417-444.
• 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.
• Kornell, N., Bjork, R. A., & Garcia, M. A. (2011). Why tests appear to prevent forgetting: A distribution-based bifurcation model. Journal of Memory and Language, 65(2), 85-97.

Common mistake

Treating "I have seen this and it looks familiar" as "I know this", and stopping study before ever checking whether you can actually produce the answer.