Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Appraising one’s own performance after a task, known as self-assessment, has been studied from a cognitive science perspec-tive in domains such as humor, trivia, and logic. Previous stud-ies have found that participants are systematically poor at judg-ing their own performance, though sometimes self-assessmentvaries based on actual performance. We explored calibrationof self-assessment on algebra problems, a domain where peo-ple have typically received explicit instruction. In this domain,we found that people do not behave as they do in other do-mains previously studied: they are generally well-calibrated injudging their algebra performance. This suggests that in thecourse of learning to solve algebra problems, people have alsolearned to accurately judge their performance, both absolutelyand relative to others.