Does thinking about how well you’ve understood what you’re reading help you learn? Previous research has found that making judgments of learning (JOLs) can directly improve learning of simple materials in the lab like lists words. Drs. Hannah Hausman and Veit Kubik tested whether this effect extends to more realistic materials, such as the instructional texts students read in school. The answer was no–participants learned just as much from reading a text about geology regardless of whether or not they ended their study session by judging how well they understood different concepts from the reading. This surprising new finding has practical implications for teachers and students and theoretical implications for how making metacognitive judgments affects memory.
Be sure to check out at article here and on our publications page.