2017 ASHS Annual Conference

Research has shown that people tend to be less certain in tasks that are difficult, possibly leading to reduced self-confidence. Many undergraduate students in horticulture consider learning the scientific names and cultural information of more than 200 herbaceous plants to be difficult. The challenge of memorizing the names and identifying herbaceous plants requires considerable meaningful and mindful effort. The objective of this study was to assess students’ abilities to predict their achievement in identifying plants. During the 2014 and 2015 fall semesters, 43 students were asked to predict the number of plants out of 12 they would correctly identify before and after eight quizzes. The first four quizzes covered perennials and were cumulative. The last four quizzes covered annuals and herbs and were also cumulative. The accuracy of student’s estimates – i.e. calibration – was calculated in two ways: 1) prediction, students’ estimates of scores they believed they would earn (before taking the quiz) minus the actual scores they earned, and 2) postdiction, students’ estimates of the scores they believed they had earned (after taking the quiz) minus the actual scores they earned. For the mean calibration scores for prediction vs. postdiction across all 8 quizzes, students were under-confident in that their estimates of their own performance were significantly lower than their actual performance. Within each category (perennials or annuals) performance generally declined after the first quiz as the number of plants increased. When the category switched from perennials to annuals, however, performance improved. This is similar to studies on “proactive interference” where performance continually declines because the items from the earlier lists interfere with memorizing items from the same category on the new lists. Based on these results we conclude that undergraduates in plant identification classes frequently underestimate their ability to learn plants. This work has implications for how we can help promote greater self-awareness and confidence that encourage students to learn more effectively.