“The library catalog is definitely the best place to find articles!” Overconfidence among Undergraduate Library Users
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Beginning in the 1980s, researchers in a wide array of academic disciplines surveyed undergraduate students to learn if they were overconfident with regard to their knowledge of disciplinary subject matter. The majority of researchers have found that students tend to overestimate their abilities within a certain body of knowledge. Up until recently, most of these projects were conducted in the fields of education, psychology, and economics. In the past few years, several academic librarians have applied these methodologies to their undergraduate patrons, curious as to whether this population demonstrates similar overconfidence in their grasp of academic research. The present study surveyed 34 undergraduates enrolled in psychology classes at a large urban university in the United States to determine if these students were overconfident about their knowledge in key library research areas. These questions included citing and referencing, identifying components of scholarly and popular sources, and developing and applying searches in electronic resources. A general knowledge survey was created for comparison purposes. Statistical analysis showed that students displayed marked overconfidence on both tools, signifying a need for increased library and metacognitive skill instruction. Depuis les années 80, les chercheurs d’un vaste éventail des domaines académiques sondaient des étudiants universitaires afin d’apprendre s’ils étaient trop confiants au sujet de leurs connaissances de la discipline. La plupart des chercheurs ont trouvé que les étudiants ont une tendance à surestimer leurs compétences dans un certain corps de connaissance. Jusqu’à récemment, la majorité de ces projets étaient menés dans les domaines de l’éducation, de la psychologie et de l’économie. Au cours de ces dernières années, plusieurs bibliothécaires académiques ont appliqué ces méthodologies sur leurs étudiants “clients”, curieux de savoir si cette population démontre un tel excès de confiance dans leur compréhension de la recherche académique. Cette étude a sondé 34 étudiants universitaires inscrits aux cours de psychologie d’une grande université urbaine aux États-Unis afin de déterminer si les étudiants avaient un excès de confiance à propos de leurs connaissances sur les domaines de recherche essentiels dans la bibliothèque. Dans le questionnaire, il s’agissait de citations et de références, d’identification des composants des sources érudites et populaires, et du développement et d’application des recherches dans les sources numériques. Un sondage de connaissances générales était créé à des fins de comparaison. L’analyse statistique a montré que les étudiants faisaient preuve d’un excès de confiance marqué sur les deux domaines, signifiant un besoin pour l’augmentation d’instruction des compétences métacognitives et d’usage de la bibliothèque.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.190 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".