People are generally overconfident in their self-assessments and this overconfidence effect is greatest for people of poorer abilities. For example, poor students predict that they will perform much better on exams than they do. One explanation for this result is that poor performers in general are doubly cursed: They lack knowledge of the material, and they lack awareness of the knowledge that they do and do not possess. The current studies examined whether poor performers in the classroom are truly unaware of their deficits by examining the relationship between students' exam predictions and their confidence in these predictions. Relative to high-performing students, the poorer students showed a greater overconfidence effect (i.e., their predictions were greater than their performance), but they also reported lower confidence in these predictions. Together, these results suggest that poor students are indeed unskilled but that they may have some awareness of their lack of metacognitive knowledge.

In two semester-long studies, we examined whether college students could improve their ability to accurately predict their own exam performance across multiple exams. We tested whether providing concrete feedback and incentives (i.e., extra credit) for accuracy would improve predictions by improving students' metacognition, or awareness of their own knowledge. Students' predictions were almost always higher than the grade they earned and this was particularly true for low-performing students. Experiment 1 demonstrated that providing incentives but minimal feedback failed to show improvement in students' metacognition or performance. However, Experiment 2 showed that when feedback was made more concrete, metacognition improved for low performing students although exam scores did not improve across exams, suggesting that feedback and incentives influenced metacognitive monitoring but not control.In an ideal world each one of us, when asked about the quality or efficiency with which we can accomplish goals, could provide a correct answer. As it is though, no one is immune to flawed self-assessment; doctors, nurses, business managers, and other trusted professionals routinely commit errors of self-assessment, which is one aspect of metacognition (Dunning et al. 2004). Metacognition refers to a person's "knowledge and cognition about cognitive phenomena" (Flavell 1979, p. 906). Three aspects of metacognition that have been researched extensively are metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive monitoring, and metacognitive control. In this paper, we focus on metacognitive monitoring, which is an individual's ability to assess the state of their cognitive activity, and metacognitive control, which is an individual's ability to regulate cognitive activity (Dunlosky & Metcalfe 2009). To illustrate these two aspects of metacognition, consider the following example: A student is studying for an anatomy exam and she asks herself how well she remembers the bones of the hand. When she answers this question about the current state of her learning, she has Metacognition Learning (2011) 6:303-314

We report the creation of alkylated poly-N-substituted glycine (peptoid) mimics of antimicrobial lipopeptides with alkyl tails ranging from 5 to 13 carbons. In several cases, alkylation significantly improved the selectivity of the peptoids with no loss in antimicrobial potency. Using this technique, we synthesized an antimicrobial peptoid only 5 monomers in length with selective, broad-spectrum antimicrobial activity as potent as previously reported dodecameric peptoids and the antimicrobial peptide pexiganan.

Purpose Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) has been associated with reduced peak exercise capacity (V̇O2peak). The causes of this impairment are not clearly established, but evidence suggests that abnormalities in cardiac function play a significant role. We hypothesized that exercise would be associated with impaired cardiac function and hemodynamics in recently diagnosed T2DM, even in the absence of clinically evident cardiovascular complications. Methods After baseline normal echocardiography screening, 10 premenopausal women with uncomplicated T2DM (average duration of diagnosed T2DM, 3.6 yr) and 10 healthy nondiabetic women of similar age, weight, and activity levels performed a peak cardiopulmonary exercise test while instrumented with an indwelling pulmonary artery catheter for assessing cardiac function. On separate days, technetium-99m sestamibi (cardolite) imaging was performed to assess myocardial perfusion at rest and peak exercise in seven T2DM and seven control patients. Results Resting measures of cardiac hemodynamics were similar in T2DM and control subjects. Absolute V̇O2peak (mL·min−1) and peak cardiac output (L·min−1) tended to be lower in T2DM than in control subjects but did not reach statistical significance. However, pulmonary capillary wedge pressure (PCWP) rose significantly more during exercise in T2DM than in controls (148% vs 109% increase at peak exercise, P < 0.01). Normalized myocardial perfusion index was lower in persons with diabetes than in controls (11.0 ± 3.5 × e−9 vs 17.5 ± 8.1 × e−9, respectively, P < 0.05) and inversely related to peak exercise PCWP (R = −0.56, P < 0.05). Conclusions Cardiac hemodynamics during graded exercise are altered in women with recently diagnosed T2DM as demonstrated by the disproportionate increase in PCWP at peak exercise compared with controls subjects. Cardiac abnormalities observed are potentially early signs of subclinical cardiac dysfunction associated with T2DM, which may precede the more greatly impaired cardiac function at rest and with exercise observed in longer established T2DM.