Fifteenth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

Students tend to overestimate their learning and performance in educational settings including physical education. Examining factors associated with students’ calibration, which is the degree of correspondence between estimated and actual performance, can shed light to this phenomenon. This study explored students’ performance calibration in sport skills in relation to task characteristics. Three experiments were conducted examining students’ calibration in tasks representing different conditions of the same sport skill (i.e., basketball shooting) including variations in shooting position (Experiment 1) and shooting distance (Experiment 2) and in tasks from different sports (i.e., basketball and soccer; Experiment 3). Participants in three experiments were 388 fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-grade students. Calibration accuracy and bias indexes were calculated based on students estimated and actual performance in sport skill tests (i.e., basketball shooting, basketball pass, and soccer pass). In all experiments, the majority of students overestimated their performance. Students were less accurate in the most difficult task suggesting the presence of the hard-easy effect. Students with higher performance were more accurate compared to students with lower performance. Some variations in calibration with respect to gender also emerged. No differences were found across tasks in the magnitude of calibration error. Moreover, almost half of the students were consistent in the direction of calibration and most of them were overestimators. These results expanded calibration research in physical education confirming students’ tendency to overestimate their performance, providing evidence regarding generalization of calibration across tasks, and informing interventions for improving students’ calibration of learning and performance in physical education.