Knowing how to manage one's own learning has become increasingly important in recent years, as both the need and the opportunities for individuals to learn on their own outside of formal classroom settings have grown. During that same period, however, research on learning, memory, and metacognitive processes has provided evidence that people often have a faulty mental model of how they learn and remember, making them prone to both misassessing and mismanaging their own learning. After a discussion of what learners need to understand in order to become effective stewards of their own learning, we first review research on what people believe about how they learn and then review research on how people's ongoing assessments of their own learning are influenced by current performance and the subjective sense of fluency. We conclude with a discussion of societal assumptions and attitudes that can be counterproductive in terms of individuals becoming maximally effective learners.
Taking tests enhances learning. But what happens when one cannot answer a test question-does an unsuccessful retrieval attempt impede future learning or enhance it? The authors examined this question using materials that ensured that retrieval attempts would be unsuccessful. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were asked fictional general-knowledge questions (e.g., "What peace treaty ended the Calumet War?"). In Experiments 3-6, participants were shown a cue word (e.g., whale) and were asked to guess a weak associate (e.g., mammal); the rare trials on which participants guessed the correct response were excluded from the analyses. In the test condition, participants attempted to answer the question before being shown the answer; in the read-only condition, the question and answer were presented together. Unsuccessful retrieval attempts enhanced learning with both types of materials. These results demonstrate that retrieval attempts enhance future learning; they also suggest that taking challenging tests-instead of avoiding errors-may be one key to effective learning.
) influential framework, students are characterized as confronting three types of decisions-selection of kind of processing, allocation of study time, and termination of study. We have expanded that framework to include decisions about study strategies and scheduling. We focus on microlevel decisions (e.g., "Do I know this word pair well enough to stop studying it?"), as did Nelson and Narens, but we also address some macrolevel issues (e.g., "What topic should I study tonight?"). What to StudyThe choice of which items to study is one of the two most frequently investigated components of self-regulated study (the other is deciding how long to persevere once a choice has been made). Examples of this type of choice include deciding which foreign language vocabulary pairs to study, which sections or chapters in a textbook to read again, which molecular structures to diagram, which musical passages to practice, and so forth.Choosing among items. Research by Kornell and Metcalfe (2006) demonstrates that when people decide what to study, a great deal depends on whether their goal is to master all to-be-learned information or only some of it. When the participants studied a list of word pairs and were then allowed to select half of those pairs for restudy, they chose yet-to-be-learned pairs, presumably with the goal of learning all of the pairs. Contrary to what was, until recently, the prevailing view, people do not always focus on the most difficult items, however. When the participants had to select word pairs to study from the list of pairs they had failed to recall on the preceding trial, making mastery impossible, they responded by selecting the easiest of these yet-to-be-learned items.Region of proximal learning as a guide to selection. Kornell and Metcalfe (2006) interpret such findings in the context of their region of proximal learning (RPL) model of study time allocation, which holds that study choices depend on a person's goals, which in turn depend on the situation. If a situation seems to allow studying to the point of mastery (e.g., in the absence of time pressure), people will choose to study the most difficult items. Under time pressure, however, people give high priority to relatively easy items-the items that are most proximal to the learned state and thus most readily learnable. In both situations (and universally in the literature), people do not study items that they think they have already learned.Choices made according to the RPL model are also adaptive. In support of the model, Kornell and Metcalfe (2006) found, in all of their experiments, that participants learned more when their choices were honored versus when they studied the items they had not chosen to study. In addition, across all of the experiments, the 10%-20% of participants whose choices did not fit the RPL model performed poorly. How Long to StudyOnce an item has been selected for study, two more decisions must be made: (1) how long to persist before moving on to another item and (2) when to stop studying the item altogether. The ...
Metacognition is knowledge that can be expressed as confidence judgments about what one knows (monitoring) and by strategies for learning what one does not know (control). Although there is a substantial literature on cognitive processes in animals, little is known about their metacognitive abilities. Here we show that rhesus macaques, trained previously to make retrospective confidence judgments about their performance on perceptual tasks, transferred that ability immediately to a new perceptual task and to a working memory task. We also show that monkeys can learn to request "hints" when they are given problems that they would otherwise have to solve by trial and error. This study demonstrates, for the first time, that nonhuman primates share with humans the ability to monitor and transfer their metacognitive ability both within and between different cognitive tasks, and to seek new knowledge on a need-to-know basis.
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