Dataset for: The effect of explaining on people’s perception of their own knowledge and of experts’ knowledge

When individuals read science news articles, they usually gain new yet shallow knowledge. Previous scientific work points to feelings of overconfidence, which may be moderated by a failure to provide a detailed explanation of a phenomenon. We investigated how participants (N = 155) perceived their own and scientists’ knowledge about a scientific topic before and after they either read or read and explained an online science article. Regardless the kind of engagement, ratings of participants’ own knowledge before and after engagement were significantly lower than the ratings of scientists’ knowledge, meanwhile ratings of own and scientists’ knowledge significantly increased in both groups. The group which provided (simplified) explanations reported a significantly higher reliance on themselves in comparison to the group only reading. Even though additional communicative act of explaining may not contribute to more productive strategies for dealing with science, the distinction between individuals and experts’ knowledge seem to prevail.