“According to the Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF), which performs studies to try and close achievement gaps, metacognition”and feedback are two most effective educational interventions it has tested.
In this study, Stanford researcher Patricia Chen et al conducted two field experiments:
- Selected university students were offered a variety of prompts to help them think about how they studied, and how they might study more effectively for an introductory statistics class exam.
- Other students who were in the control group received a reminder that their exam was coming up and that they should prepare.
Those who reflected on how they required to perform and what they needed to do to perform better outperformed those who did not, by an average of one-third of a letter grade.
Students who received the intervention prompts twice did better than those who received it once.
