LAUSR

Students’ judgments of their own learning are often misled by intuitive yet false ideas about how people learn. In educational settings, learning experiences that minimize effort and increase the appearance of fluency, engagement, and enthusiasm often inflate students’ estimates of their own learning, but do not always enhance their actual learning. We review the research on these “illusions of learning,” how they can mislead students’ evaluations of the effectiveness of their instructors, and how students’ evaluations of teaching effectiveness can be biased by factors unrelated to teaching. We argue that the heavy reliance on student evaluations of teaching in decisions about faculty hiring and promotion might encourage teaching practices that boost students’ subjective ratings of teaching effectiveness, but do not enhance—and may even undermine—students’ learning and their development of metacognitive skills.