No abstract

Accurate knowledge monitoring is critical to the learning process, as it allows one to regulate studying and test preparation. Thus, a number of investigations have attempted to improve metacognition in the classroom, with the ultimate goal of improving student exam performance. However, such interventions have had inconsistent success using varying paradigms. We compared the effectiveness of five interventions aimed at improving prediction accuracy in a laboratory environment: review, salient feedback, motivation warning lecture, incentives, and reflection. Only the salient feedback and the motivation warning lecture interventions significantly improved participants' prediction accuracy from test 1 to test 2. Review, incentives, and reflection did not improve predictive or postdictive calibration. Well-timed salient feedback and a lecture warning students not to be biased by desired grades were effective methods of improving calibration accuracy. Results offer effective interventions to improve metacognition that could be used in a classroom setting.

Subjective age, or how old a person feels, is an important measure of self-perception that is associated with consequential cognitive and health outcomes. Recent research suggests that subjective age is affected by certain situations, including cognitive testing contexts. The current study examined whether cognitive testing and positive performance feedback affect subjective age and subsequent cognitive performance. Older adults took a series of neuropsychological and cognitive tests and subjective age was measured at various time points. Participants also either received positive or no feedback on an initial cognitive task, an analogies task. Results showed that participants felt older over the course of the testing session, particularly after taking a working memory test, relative to baseline. Positive feedback did not significantly mitigate this subjective aging effect. Results suggest that subjective age is malleable and that it can be affected by standard cognitive and neuropsychological test conditions.

Students often prepare for exams by restudying slides or notes, but the familiarity of these repeatedly reinstated contexts may influence students to be unduly confident in their knowledge, and cease study prematurely. Experiment 1 investigated the effects of reinstatement of encoding contexts during delayed judgments of learning (JOLs) in a laboratory paradigm. At encoding, word pairs were superimposed over unrelated 5-s video contexts, with one video context per target. Delayed judgments of learning for cue-target pairs were given with encoding contexts either changed or reinstated. When the encoding context was changed, judgments of learning decreased relative to the reinstatement condition, without a concomitant decrease in recall (tested later with no context cues), thus producing a metamemory illusion. Experiments 2 and 3 replicated these results with different designs. Although context manipulations did not improve metacognitive accuracy, unfamiliar contexts reduced JOLs, a desirable impact that is associated with increased study choice.