Metacognitive and control strategies in study-time allocation.

Abstract

The issue of how people use their metacognitive judgments about what they know and how well they know it to take control over their own learning is of primary concern in this article. The fact that in many situations people have relatively accurate metacognitions is well documented (Brown, 1978;, 1997 Gnmeberg & Monks, 1974; Jacoby, Bjork, & Kelley, 1993;Johnson, 1988;Johnson & Raye, 1981;King, Zechmeister, & Shaughnessy, 1980;Koriat, 1975Koriat, , 1993Koriat, , 1995Koriat, , 1997Koriat, , 1998Koriat & Goldsmith, 1996, 1998Leonesio & Nelson, 1990;Lovelace, 1984; Mazzoni, Cornoldi, Tomat, & Vecchi, 1997;Mazzoni & Nelson, 1995;Metcalfe, 1986aMetcalfe, , 1986b Metcalfe, Schwartz, & Joaqnim, 1993;Metcalfe & Weibe, 1987;Nelson, 1988;Nelson & Dunlosky, 1991Nelson, Leonesio, Landwehr, & Narens, 1986;Schwartz & Metcalfe, 1994;Schwartz & Smith, 1997;Smith, Brown, & Balfour, 1991;Thiede & Dunlosky, 1994; Vesonder & Voss, 1985; Wldner & Smith, 1996;Widner, Smith, & Graziano, 1996). Ease-of-learning judgments (EeLs; Underwood, 1966), feeling-of-knowing judgments (FIGs;Hart, 1965;Nelson, Leonesio, Shimamura, Landwehr, & Narens, 1982), and judgments of difficulty (JODs) or of learning (JOLs; Arbuckle & Cuddy, 1969;Gardiner & Klee, 1976;Groninger, 1979;King et al., 1980;Lovelace, 1984) generally have been shown to predict subsequent memory performance with above-chance accuracy. Having established that Lisa K. Son and Janet Metcalfe, Department of Psychology, Columbia University.This research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Grant 48066. We would like to thank Ozlem Ayduk, Brady Butterfield, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, Jasia Pietrzak, and Lisa Schwartz for their help. We also appreciate the comments of Thomas O. Nelson, Keith Thiede, and an anonymous reviewer on a draft of this article.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Lisa K. Son, Department of Psychology, 406 Schermerhorn Hall, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027. Electronic mail may be sent to son@psych.columbia.edu. people appear to have access to accurate metalmowledge, the question of how they put that knowledge to use is becoming focal.Some theories indicate that metacognitions play a central role in a variety of cognitive tasks, including memory retrieval (Reder, 1987;Reder & Ritter, 1992), initial memory encoding (Metcalfe, 1993), problem solving (Metcalfe, 1986b;Simon & Newell, 1971), and self-directed learning . As was assumed by early researchers such as Flavell (1979) and Flavell and Wellman (1977), these self-reflective processes are crucial in controlling and guiding human cognition (see Metcalfe, 1996, in press, for review). Recently, investigators have begun intensively and systematically to explore the question of primary interest in this article: How do people use these metacognitive judgments to control their study-time allocation and hence to determine what it is that they will learn?Interest in the control functions of people's metacognitions was fostered by a framework for human metacognition forw...

Study efficacy and the region of proximal learning framework.

“…The fact that self-controlled learning was suboptimal may have been a result of the instructions participants were given, which emphasized mastery of all items (see Metcalfe, 2002). More recent findings suggest that people select in a manner that is very much in keeping with Atkinson's theory, if not his data (Metcalfe, 2000;Metcalfe & Kornell, 2005). Like Atkinson, Mazzoni and Cornoldi (1993, Experiment 3) found that self-controlled study was more effective than random study-time allocation.…”

The intricate relationships between monitoring and control in metacognition: Lessons for the cause-and-effect relation between subjective experience and behavior.

“…This was done in Experiment 6, which capitalized on the finding that under time pressure learners spend more time studying the easier items (Metcalfe, 2002;Son & Metcalfe, 2000). We argue that time pressure produces a qualitative change in study time allocation from being data driven to being goal driven because learners must, in fact, operate against the data-driven tendency to invest more study time in the more difficult items.…”

Answering questions after initial study guides attention during restudy

“…In other studies, however, students have selected material for restudy which they believed to be relatively easy (i.e., information that was retrievable), probably because they want to rehearse this material (e.g., Metcalfe & Kornell, 2003;Thiede & Dunlosky, 1999;Son & Metcalfe, 2000) and this seemed much more beneficial than dropping material from further study (Karpicke & Roediger, 2007).…”