Self‐paced study time as a cue for recall predictions across school age

Abstract

Recent work on metacognition indicates that monitoring is sometimes based itself on the feedback from control operations. Evidence for this pattern has not only been shown in adults but also in elementary schoolchildren. To explore whether this finding can be generalized to a wide range of age groups, 160 participants from first to eighth grade participated in a study based on a self-paced study time (ST) allocation paradigm. In contrast to previous studies, picture pairs instead of word pairs were used as stimuli to compensate for reduced reading skills in younger participants. Actual ST and judgments of learning (JOLs) made at the end of each study trial were used as core variables. The results are in line with previous findings, in that children's JOLs decreased with increasing ST, suggesting that JOLs were based on the memorizing effort heuristic that easily learned items are more likely to be remembered. Weaker inverse relationship between JOLs and ST was found for the younger children. Overall, these results underline the importance of mnemonic cues in shaping metacognitive feelings not only in adults but also in older children and expose a developmental trend in their use along childhood.

Relation of Metacognitive Monitoring and Control Processes across the Life-Span

“…A follow-up study by the same authors (Koriat et al, 2009b) contrasting second and forth graders' performance in a setting which provided an unlimited number of trials to acquisition found evidence that even the younger participants were able to adopt the ELER-heuristic when items varied sufficiently in intrinsic difficulty. Hoffmann-Biencourt et al (2010) also confirmed this memorizing effort-heuristic with a similar self-paced learning task but different learning materials (picture pairs instead of word pairs) in a sample of children from grades 1 to 8. Yet, for first time, this study also documented a developmental trend in that it found a weaker relationship between ST and JOLs for younger children.…”

“…Previous research suggests that from the middle of the elementary school years on, children begin to successfully use the heuristic, the longer they study an item, the less likely they are to recall it, that is a CM-model (Koriat et al, 2009a;Hoffmann-Biencourt et al, 2010). Therefore, third-grade children were chosen as the youngest age group.…”

“…Additionally, third-grade children possess sufficient reading skills to master the word-pair stimuli used in most previous studies on data-oriented learning. The second age group consisted of adolescents as evidence for the CM-model gets stronger from the beginning of the elementary school years to adulthood (Hoffmann-Biencourt et al, 2010) and in this period of life important changes in the flexible interplay between monitoring and control seem to occur . Young adults served as a comparison group as metacognitive abilities should reach their peak at this age.…”

The relatedness effect on judgments of learning: A closer look at the contribution of processing fluency

“…In three experiments, we found that processing fluency contributed to the relatedness effect. First, Experiment 1 showed that processing fluency as measured by number of trials to acquisition (e.g., Hoffmann-Biencourt et al, 2010;Koriat, 2008) contributed to the effect of relatedness on JOLs both for lists with uniformly strong associations and for lists with a wide range of associative strengths. Mediation analyses revealed that the indirect effect of relatedness on JOLs mediated by number of trials to acquisition explained up to 26 % of the total effect of relatedness on JOLs.…”

“…below: (1) the number of trials to acquisition in Experiment 1 (e.g., Hoffmann-Biencourt, Lockl, Schneider, Ackerman, & Koriat, 2010;Koriat, Ackerman, Lockl, & Schneider, 2009;Koriat, 2008) and (2) self-paced study time (e.g., Castel et al, 2007;Koriat, 2008;Koriat, Ma'ayan, & Nussinson, 2006;Miele, Finn, & Molden, 2011;Undorf & Erdfelder, 2011, 2013 in Experiments 2 and 3.…”