Looking at Mental Effort Appraisals through a Metacognitive Lens: Are they Biased?
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Looking at Mental Effort Appraisals through a Metacognitive Lens: Are they Biased? Katharina Scheiter 1,2
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& Rakefet Ackerman & Vincent Hoogerheide
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# The Author(s) 2020
Abstract
A central factor in research guided by the Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) is the mental effort people invest in performing a task. Mental effort is commonly assessed by asking people to report their effort throughout performing, learning, or problem-solving tasks. Although this measurement is considered reliable and valid in CLT research, metacognitive research provides robust evidence that self-appraisals of performance are often biased. In this review, we consider the possibility that mental effort appraisals may also be biased. In particular, we review signs for covariations and mismatches between subjective and objective measures of effort. Our review suggests that subjective and most objective effort measures appear reliable and valid when evaluated in isolation, because they discriminate among tasks of varying complexity. However, not much is known about their mutual correspondence—that is, whether subjective measures covariate with objective measures. Moreover, there is evidence that people utilize heuristic cues when appraising their effort, similar to utilization of heuristic cues underlying metacognitive appraisals of performance. These cues are identified by exposing biases—mismatch in effects of cue variations on appraisals and performance. The review concludes with a research agenda in which we suggest applying the well-established methodologies for studying biases in self-appraisals of performance in metacognitive research to investigating effort appraisals. One promising method could be to determine the covariation of effort appraisals and objective effort measures as an indicator of the resolution of effort appraisals. Keywords Instructional design . Metacognitive monitoring and control . Mental effort . Selfregulated learning . Cognitive load measurement
* Katharina Scheiter k.scheiter@iwm–tuebingen.de Extended author information available on the last page of the article
Educational Psychology Review
Introduction While performing daily cognitively demanding tasks, like navigating, designing, decision making, solving problems, and learning new information, people constantly regulate their mental effort, that is, the amount of cognitive resources they allocate to achieve their goal of performing the task. They might invest a lot of effort because the task is highly challenging but carries important implications. Alternatively, they might invest only little effort either because the task appears easy or because it looks impossible to solve and they give up right away (e.g., when facing a new type of task, a student may announce “we did not learn how to do it” and give up immediately). In all these situations, people must assess their chances of success and ongoing progress, either implicitly or explicitly, and based on this subjective assessment, take regulatory decisions, such as whether to invest additional effort,
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