Who knows? Explaining Impacts on the Assessment of our own Knowledge and of the Knowledge of Experts

Children and adults are mostly too optimistic when assessing their understanding of complex causal entities. Only when asked to explain the underlying mechanisms of such entities, their metacognitive self-assessment becomes more realistic. The Illusion of Explanatory Depth (Rozenblit & Keil, 2002) demonstrates the effects of arguing on metacognitive self-assessments. First, we tested for this IOED effect. Adults assessed their own knowledge about topics regarding health improvement and climate protection before and after explaining the underlying causal mechanisms. Second, we asked them to judge the pertinence of different kinds of experts for the critical topics before and after the explaining task. Results confirm that arguing about complex causal mechanisms not only affects the assessments of one's own knowledge, but also the assessment about how pertinent knowledge is distributed among different kinds of experts. Results are discussed in the context of argumentative theory of reasoning and regarding their implications for science education.