How many times have you been completely sure about something, but it turns out you were wrong? Perhaps in an argument about the capital of Canada with an equally certain colleague? Or when giving the year of the first moon landing at your local pub quiz?
Chances are, if you’ve ever been in a position of complete certainty and ultimately proved wrong, you will be able to remember it. Because of this, experts have long been looking into the role of certainty in learning - and also the ways in which teachers might be able to harness it.
“Certainty is a feeling about the quality of your beliefs,” says Carolyn Baer, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, who has researched its role in learning. “It’s a graded sense that tells you how sure you are about something being true. Uncertainty is the other side of that coin.”
Research shows that even infants appear to possess certainty and use it to guide their learning. In fact, Baer says, it’s not even just a human-specific signal. “Non-human animals like crows and rats also represent certainty and use it to guide their behaviour,” she explains.
Humans’ certainty tends to become more specific and sophisticated as they mature. Children may tend to begin life being somewhat overconfident, and this fades as they gain experience in the world. “Children also become better at reporting different levels of certainty - for example, ‘I am pretty sure’, versus ‘I am really sure’,” she says.
Certainty about a particular fact or concept changes with incoming evidence, research suggests. It is “normal” for children learning something new to begin more sure, then observe something that justifiably shakes their confidence and encourages them to reconsider their initial beliefs, Baer says.
“A gain in uncertainty is not inherently a bad thing. In fact, becoming less certain can motivate a learner to become more curious and gather new information,” she adds.
Baer says that children, like adults, see certainty as a “useful signal” about whether to trust a belief or dismiss it. “We use certainty as a signal to compare beliefs and make decisions,” Baer continues. “Imagine answering a multiple choice question by comparing your certainty about which choice feels most likely to be correct.
“We can use certainty to guide our behaviour. Feeling uncertain can prompt us to ask for help or seek further information. In this way, uncertainty allows us to direct our limited energy towards learning unknown things rather than wasting time on things we already know.”
Uncertainty has an important role to play in the classroom, then, because it is part of what makes us motivated to learn, and helps us to diagnose gaps in our understanding.
One paper - co-authored by Baer and Celeste Kidd, an assistant professor at Berkeley - suggests that the degree to which people are certain guides how they make choices about whether to collect information and learn from the world.
“When certainty is well-calibrated to a person’s observations and experiences, it can guide a student to spend more time where they are more uncertain, thus encouraging knowledge acquisition,” says Kidd.
However, she adds, there are also times when feelings of certainty can lead us astray.
“Under particular circumstances, certainty is sometimes not well-calibrated to how certain a person should be. For example, if a person is certain that they know the answer to a particular trivia question - even if they are wrong - they are not motivated to check the answer, so they don’t. They just get stuck with the wrong answer. Unjustified certainty can thus impede learning.”
Unjustified certainty can occur when a learner gets a “concentrated dose of feedback”, Kidd explains. “If a learner has a certain idea in mind, and they receive feedback that suggests the certain idea is correct several times, this could lead to them being certain that they have the right idea - even if, in fact, they do not.”
Once unjustified certainty is established, we know it’s “really hard to shake”, she continues - meaning it is vital that feedback given to students is accurate, and not too concentrated.
“Feedback on the same concept spaced out over multiple assignments throughout a [term] is better than a bunch of feedback concentrated all on a single assignment,” Kidd continues, giving an example from her own childhood to illustrate where things can go wrong.
“In high school, I studied hard and did very well in physics class initially. I did so well, in fact, that unbeknown to me, my poor overworked physics teacher began using my assignments as the answer keys,” she says. “I studied a little less hard for a test, and I still got 100 per cent even though I felt like I was making stuff up in parts, because the teacher was using my exam as the answer key rather than actually checking it.”
When Kidd saw the high grade, she had high certainty that she had correctly learned the concepts being tested. “I disregarded that same physics material when I encountered it again in a college physics class years later,” she says. “I didn’t realise how much I didn’t understand until I fully failed an exam in college.
“It was only then I realised the certainty I had on certain physics concepts was completely unjustified. Teachers should know feedback matters for guiding students towards accurate models of their own uncertainty - and accurate models of your own uncertainty are crucial for learning.”
But does the research suggest that pupils’ certainty - or lack of certainty - can be cultivated to help them learn? Can teachers tap into it to improve attainment in their classes?
It’s certainly a possibility, says Kidd - and the way to make it happen is through taking steps that many teachers are probably already taking, but making those steps more explicit.
“For verbal children, teachers can encourage question asking,” says Kidd. “In this way, children will volunteer what they do and don’t know so that a teacher can use that information to guide their learning.
“Children who are less familiar with environments where question-asking is welcome may need some encouragement initially. Teachers can model question-asking, and reward question-asking with positive signals like smiles and verbal encouragement like saying: ‘Great question!’.”
Pupils can also be encouraged to think of curiosity as a virtue, Kidd adds. “Children are naturally curious, as are all humans. Creating an environment where curiosity is welcome can help facilitate learning.”
Baer emphasises that it is also vital that students express their uncertainty - something that is “necessary for learning to occur”.
“Moderate uncertainty can signal to learners that there’s an opportunity to learn,” she explains. “When uncertainty is too great, however, that can signal to the learner that learning may not be possible or efficient. Learning can only occur when a child has just enough background that they can make sense of the new material.”
Teachers, therefore, need to monitor levels of certainty - and uncertainty - closely, if they want to help students to make the most of it.
Chris Parr is a freelance journalist
