In an experiment with 56 young adults, the hypothesis was tested that information about the format of an anticipated test improves metacognitive monitoring. Half of the participants were informed about the format of the test before they started studying a text about human genetics. The other half of the sample received the same information after studying the text. All participants then answered 15 true-false inference items about the contents of the text and judged their confidence in the correctness of each answer. Whereas experimental and control group did not differ in the number of correct answers, the confidence judgments in the experimental group were more accurate and discriminated better between correct and incorrect answers than the control participants' judgments. Furthermore, the informed participants' discrimination performance correlated positively with their domain-related prior knowledge. The results extend earlier findings concerning the role of the test format for monitoring processes.Monitoring one's own learning process is generally viewed as a key condition for selfregulated learning (e.g., Winne and Hadwin 1998). Valid information about the learning progress is necessary, for example, to adapt learning strategies (e.g., Winne and JamiesonNoel 2002), to allocate learning time (e.g., Ghatala et al. 1989), or to process feedback efficiently (e.g., Butler et al. 2008).The quality of metacognitive monitoring is often conceptualized as the relationship between learning behavior or learning performance as subjectively perceived by the learner on the one hand and the actual learning behavior or performance on the other hand. For example, learners' self-reports on their study strategies were compared with the actually Metacognition Learning (2010) 5:195-206