Jansa JM, Ringsmuth EM, Smith AP. Calibrating Confidence: Civic Education and the Relationship between Objective Political Knowledge and Political Knowledge Confidence. Perspectives on Politics. 2025;23(3):997-1012. doi:10.1017/S1537592724001403
We find consistent evidence that students gain knowledge confidence and objective political knowledge after taking Introduction to American Government. Our study also shows that confidence in one’s knowledge about politics can become more aligned with one’s objective knowledge after taking college civics. The findings speak to the power of civic education to hone individuals’ understanding about politics and to equip them to participate in the democratic process.
Importantly, we also find evidence that a student’s starting level of objective knowledge conditions whether and how the gap between objective knowledge and knowledge confidence closes over the semester. For example, students initially low in objective knowledge were disproportionately overconfident, but these students saw relatively higher gains in objective knowledge compared to knowledge confidence over the semester. Additionally, it is low objective knowledge students who gained the most along both dimensions of knowledge. While some of these students’ calibration did not improve, almost half of those who exhibited the Dunning-Kruger effect at the beginning of the semester decreased their overconfidence after taking college-level civics. This meant that these students, after exhibiting significant growth along both dimensions, ended with knowledge levels that more closely resembled their peers who exhibited higher levels of objective knowledge at the beginning of the semester. This raises the possibility that additional civic education could help overconfident students calibrate like their higher knowledge counterparts did over the semester. In all, the findings suggest that Introduction to American Government courses have the potential to develop those with low levels of objective knowledge in ways heretofore not established in the literature on political knowledge.