#30 Add confidence scores on mini-whiteboards

They will give you extra insight into your students' understanding

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💡 A quick tip to try in class this week 💡

I know I start off most of these newsletters with something along the lines of “I am obsessed with…”. Well, here comes another one: I am obsessed with asking students to assign confidence scores to their answers.

I first wrote about the role confidence can play in learning in How I wish I’d taught maths, and then we published a research paper on the same topic. Since then, my obsession has only grown.

I think asking students to assign confidence scores to their answers (before they know whether that answer is right or wrong) is a good idea for a number of reasons:

1. It compels students to reflect on their thought processes as well as their answer

2. It sets up the potential for students to benefit from the hypercorrection effect, where high-confident errors are more likely to be corrected in the future following feedback than low-confidence errors

3. It provides the teacher with really useful information as to how secure students feel their knowledge is

Now, I have always used confidence scores on paper, such as in Low-Stakes Quizzes or homework. But recently I have been experimenting with using confidence scores on mini-whiteboards.

Let’s imagine we ask students to add three-fifths and one-quarter.

We tell our students to do their working out on the back of their boards, write their answers nice and big in the centre of the front of their boards, and write their confidence scores (0 to 10, with 10 representing the highest level of confidence) in a box in the top-right-hand corner. Now, imagine these are four of the boards we see when students show us their answers:

This gives us some super valuable information that we could use when choosing which students to call upon to explain their answer.

Who would you call upon, and in which order?

Here is one possibility:

• Board 1 - No response: We could ask this student first to see if the response is due to a lack of effort or a lack of understanding.

• Board 2 - High-confidence error: We could call upon this student next to draw out a common misconception. It is also important that we return to this student at the end of the questioning process to ensure they can identify their mistake and articulate the correct process so they may benefit from the hypercorrection effect.

• Board 3 - Low-confidence correct answer: Calling upon this student next may prove a magical moment as they realise that, despite their doubts, they are correct and are probably better at maths than they think.

• Board 4 - High-confidence correct answer: This could be the final student we ask as they may provide a strong explanation that others can learn from

Now, of course, this approach relies on students being accurate with their confidence scores. You can encourage this by gamifying things: tell students that if they get a question correct, they get a number of points equivalent to their confidence score. But if they get the question wrong, they lose a number of points equivalent to their confidence score!

What would you need to change to make this tip work for you?

When could you try it for the first time?

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🏃🏻‍♂️Before you go, have you… 🏃🏻‍♂️

1. … tried last week’s tip about three questions to ask in a departmental meeting?

2. … read my latest Eedi newsletter about how prescriptive a Head of Department should be?

3. … listened to my latest podcast about securing 100% student engagement?

4. … read my Tips for Teachers book?

5. … considered booking some CPD, coaching or maths department support?

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