Within and between person associations of calibration and achievement

Self-regulated learning (SRL), the ability to set goals and monitor and control progress toward these goals, is an important part of a positive mathematical disposition. Within SRL, accurate metacognitive monitoring is necessary to drive control processes. Students who display this accuracy are said to be calibrated, and although calibration is a growing area of research within Educational Psychology, unanswered questions remain about calibration's role as an aspect of metacognition, including the unique association between calibration and academic performance. In this study, calibration is characterized as part of a dynamic system that varies across tasks within the same person; variance in calibration is associated with variance in performance gain for the same student across tasks (quizzes within a year-long mathematics curriculum, ST Math). Both accurate determinations of certainty (Sensitivity) and uncertainty (Specificity) have unique small, yet statistically significant, associations with performance gains from pre to posttest in ST Math. For Specificity, there also remains a contextual association with performance at the Person level. Results are discussed in light of prior research on calibration and of theories of SRL; the data and analyses present a novel approach to studying calibration within a dynamic system and offer insights for future work.