Can Students Evaluate Their Own Understanding?

Can students assess their own understanding in introductory physics? How does their assessment change during the learning process? Instructors often gauge how well students are assimilating the material based on the number of questions or confused looks they receive during their interactions with students. However, it is unclear how well students are able to recognize their own understanding (or lack thereof). In this talk, we present preliminary results from our study of the relationship between students' perceived understanding and their actual understanding of introductory physics concepts. We show that while students are not very good at assessing their own understanding at the beginning of the learning process they are much better at assessing it at the end.