In the Eyes of the Beholder: How Experience Can Influence Perceptions of Interest and Engagement

Abstract

The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias where an individual unknowingly assumes that an individual they are conversing with has the same background of information to understand. Previous research has shown that this bias is present everywhere including adults and younger children. I question whether graduate student instructors fall victim to the curse of knowledge and if they will overestimate or underestimate undergraduate students’ ratings of instruction as well as level of engagement. With the use of continuous data collection via joystick, I attempt to obtain data to uncover how this information imbalance between graduate student instructors and undergraduate students can affect classroom settings. I hypothesize graduate student instructors will fall victim to the curse of knowledge and because of this, they will overestimate undergraduate students’ ratings. If my hypothesis holds true, it can suggest that this information imbalance can effect classroom settings for both parties involved.