T&L Activity: How confident are you that your answer is correct?

By Ruhina Cockar

Picture a student who is so confident in their answer, you pick on them to answer in front of the class, and they give you an incorrect answer. Why was the student so confident?

How can you train students to think about their level of confidence in their answers?

It’s a skill I know Historians use in their pedagogy - asking students how sure are they in the validity of the argument put forward or the source they are analysing - can this be transferred to other subjects?

An activity I recently observed a member of staff do was a Confidence-Weighted True/False Task, which I was really inspired by and transferred to a maths context to talk you through it. 

What is the activity?

I shared a google doc with this table of statements on google classroom as an assignment:

Q	Statement	True/False	Reason for answer	Confidence  (out of 5 where 5 is very confident)
1	The general form of an equation of a straight line is  y = mx + c
2	The gradient is a numerical value of where the graph crosses the y-intercept
3	m represents the y-intercept, c represents the gradient of the line
4	I cannot find the equation of a straight line given a gradient and one coordinate point
5	I can find the equation of the line given two coordinate points
6	A straight line graph is called a quadratic graph
7	Parallel lines have the same gradient and different y-intercepts

I gave students 10-15 minutes to work through this independently.

I then used this as an opportunity to do some assessment for learning and self-assessment simultaneously. I asked students to show me whether they wrote true or false and their confidence level on a mini whiteboard. I then picked on different students to explain their answers (you could pick someone with a high confidence level and a wrong answer, low confidence level and a correct answer). Students then either corrected their answers or added detail to them in green font.

We went through each statement with this process.

Here’s an example of a HPA student’s corrected version of the table:

Q	Statement	True/False	Reason for answer	Confidence  (out of 5 where 5 is very confident)
1	The general form of an equation of a straight line is  y = mx + c	True	The general equation of a straight line is y = mx + c, where m is the gradient, and y = c is the value where the line cuts the y-axis. This number c is called the intercept on the y-axis. A linear graph where the gradient is content - for everyone along, you go up. X has the power of 1.	5
2	The gradient is a numerical value of where the graph crosses the y-intercept	False	the gradient is the numerical measure of the steepness of a straight line	4
3	m represents the y-intercept, c represents the gradient of the line	False	C represents the y-intercept	5
4	I cannot find the equation of a straight line given a gradient and one coordinate point	False	You can do this by substituting the gradient and the coordinate into y=mx+c	3
5	I can find the equation of the line given two coordinate points	True	You can find the gradient using the difference in y divided by the difference in x coordinates, then substitute in a coordinate to find the y intercept.	5
6	A straight-line graph is called a quadratic graph	False	A straight-line graph is in the form of y = mx + c and is a simple straight line whereas a quadratic function is one of the form y = ax2 + bx + c and has a U-shaped curve. A straight line graph is called a linear graph.	4
7	Parallel lines have the same gradient and different y-intercepts	True	Lines that are parallel have different y-intercepts  This is because in order to be parallel you need to have the same steepness/angle	5

You will notice that this student felt confident in their true/false answer but was not as articulate in their reasoning - does this show the depth of understanding expected from this student?

Why you should try this activity

• It encourages reasoning and develops students literacy skills

• It encourages students to think in depth to be able to give a suitably detailed answer

• All students were engaged and felt encouraged to answer questions as they had already shown their confidence in their answer (i.e. that it was low) 

• Could link this to retrieval practice by making it a low stakes assessment a few weeks after teaching a topic

Other ways of approaching this activity:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1475725715605627

It would be great to see your versions of this activity so do share them with me - I’d love to link your examples in here as an update!

Further Reading 

Correlating Student Knowledge and Confidence Using a Graded Knowledge Survey to Assess Student Learning in a General Microbiology Classroom