2 docs tagged with "metacognition"

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited knowledge or skill in a domain overestimate their competence, while experts tend to underestimate theirs. Documented by David Dunning and Justin Kruger (Cornell, 1999), it explains why novices are often more confident than intermediate learners, why self-assessment is unreliable, and why the most dangerous decisions are sometimes made by people with just enough knowledge to feel confident.

Rubber Duck Debugging is the practice of explaining a problem in detail to an inanimate listener — traditionally a rubber duck — to solve it. The act of articulating a problem precisely and sequentially, out loud or in writing, triggers the self-explanatory process that reveals where reasoning has gone wrong or where assumptions are unjustified. Widely used in software engineering, it extends to any problem-solving context where verbalisation clarifies thinking.