Metacognition About Collaborative Learning: Students' Beliefs Are Inconsistent with Their Learning Preferences.

Collaboration plays an important role in educational contexts. However, little is known about students' metacognitive beliefs about collaboration. The present study used an online survey to investigate students' beliefs toward group study/recall, their studying preferences, strategies they use when studying individually and in groups, and important characteristics of their group members.

How should exemplars be sequenced in inductive learning? Empirical evidence versus learners' opinions.

The sequencing of exemplars during study can have a large effect on category or concept induction. Counter to learners' intuitions, interleaving exemplars from different categories is often more effective for learning the different underlying categories than is blocking all the exemplars by category (e.g.

The Critical Importance of Retrieval--and Spacing--for Learning.

We examined the impact of repeated testing and repeated studying on long-term learning. In Experiment 1, we replicated Karpicke and Roediger's (2008) influential results showing that once information can be recalled, repeated testing on that information enhances learning, whereas restudying that information does not. We then examined whether the apparent ineffectiveness of restudying might be attributable to the spacing differences between items that were inherent in the between-subjects design employed by Karpicke and Roediger.

Can Multiple-Choice Testing Induce Desirable Difficulties? Evidence from the Laboratory and the Classroom.

The term desirable difficulties (Bjork, 1994) refers to conditions of learning that, though often appearing to cause difficulties for the learner and to slow down the process of acquisition, actually improve long-term retention and transfer. One known desirable difficulty is testing (as compared with restudy), although typically it is tests that clearly involve retrieval--such as free and cued recall tests--that are thought to induce these learning benefits and not multiple-choice tests. Nonetheless, multiple-choice testing is ubiquitous in educational settings and many other high-stakes situations.

Learning versus performance: an integrative review.

The primary goal of instruction should be to facilitate long-term learning-that is, to create relatively permanent changes in comprehension, understanding, and skills of the types that will support long-term retention and transfer. During the instruction or training process, however, what we can observe and measure is performance, which is often an unreliable index of whether the relatively long-term changes that constitute learning have taken place. The time-honored distinction between learning and performance dates back decades, spurred by early animal and motor-skills research that revealed that learning can occur even when no discernible changes in performance are observed.

Judgments of learning as memory modifiers.

A frequent procedure used to study how individuals monitor their own learning is to collect judgments of learning (JOLs) during acquisition, considered to be important, in part, because such judgments are assumed to guide how individuals allocate their future learning resources. In such research, however, a tacit assumption is frequently made: Namely, that asking for such metacognitive judgments does not affect the learning process per se. In 3 experiments, the present research addressed the accuracy of this assumption and tested a possible account--based on aspects of Koriat's cue-utilization approach to JOLs (Koriat, 1997) and de Winstanley, Bjork, and Bjork's (1996) transfer-appropriate multifactor account of generation effects--for why the mere act of making JOLs might enhance later memory for the information so judged.

The fate of being forgotten: information that is initially forgotten is judged as less important.

Is forgotten information deemed less important than remembered information? The present study examined potential biases regarding the importance of information that was initially forgotten. In Experiment 1 participants studied words paired with varying point values that denoted their importance and were encouraged to recall higher value words. Participants recalled more high-value words on an initial test.

Older adults predict more recollective experiences than younger adults.

We investigated whether older adults could successfully monitor age-related declines in recollection that are typically found on episodic memory tests. In two experiments, we elicited prospective metamemory judgments based on the remember-know procedure, called Judgments of Remembering and Knowing (JORKs). That is, participants predicted whether word pairs would be remembered (i.

Recollection-based prospective metamemory judgments are more accurate than those based on confidence: judgments of remembering and knowing (JORKS).

Five experiments were conducted to examine whether the nature of the information that is monitored during prospective metamemory judgments affected the relative accuracy of those judgments. We compared item-by-item judgments of learning (JOLs), which involved participants determining how confident they were that they would remember studied items, with judgments of remembering and knowing (JORKs), which involved participants determining whether studied items would later be accompanied by contextual details (i.e.

The interplay between value and relatedness as bases for metacognitive monitoring and control: evidence for agenda-based monitoring.

Two experiments are reported examining how value and relatedness interact to influence metacognitive monitoring and control processes. Participants studied unrelated and related word pairs, each accompanied by point values denoting how important the items were to remember. These values were presented either before or after each pair in a between-subjects design, and participants made item-by-item judgments of learning (JOLs) predicting the likelihood that each item would be remembered later.

Metacognition and depressive realism: evidence for the level-of-depression account.

Introduction. The present study examined the relationship between metacognition (i.e.

Are survival processing memory advantages based on ancestral priorities?

Recent research has suggested that our memory systems are especially tuned to process information according to its survival relevance, and that inducing problems of "ancestral priorities" faced by our ancestors should lead to optimal recall performance (Nairne & Pandeirada, Cognitive Psychology, 2010). The present study investigated the specificity of this idea by comparing an ancestor-consistent scenario and a modern survival scenario that involved threats that were encountered by human ancestors (e.g.