Known unknowns: Exploring In-Service Teachers’ Metacognitive Sensitivity and Efficiency

Despite the growing attention to metacognition in education, little is known about how in-service teachers monitor the reliability of their own professional knowledge. This study investigates teachers’ metacognitive sensitivity and efficiency in evaluating educational claims. Drawing on a large-scale dataset of confidence-rated responses to a questionnaire on educational misconceptions, we estimated metacognitive metrics based on Signal Detection Theory, including meta-d′ and M-ratio. At the group level, teachers showed moderate ability to discriminate between correct and incorrect items (d′ = 0.62) and some insight into the accuracy of their judgments (meta-d′ = 0.53), but their metacognitive efficiency was suboptimal (M-ratio = 0.62). Generalized linear mixed models revealed that metacognitive calibration varied systematically by gender and educational stage. These findings suggest that metacognitive monitoring is shaped by contextual and professional factors, rather than being uniformly distributed across the teaching population. We discuss the implications of these results for understanding the persistence of educational misconceptions.