Is retrieval the key? Metamemory judgment and testing as learning strategies

Re-reading is the most common learning strategy, albeit not a very efficient one. Testing is highly efficient, but not perceived by students as a learning strategy. Prospective judgment-of-learning (JOL) reflect the learner's impression of subsequently being able to retrieve the ongoing learning in a cued-recall task. Estimating JOL involves attempting to retrieve the information, as in testing. The few studies that have explored the potential mnemonic benefit of JOL have yielded contradictory results. Our aim was to compare JOL and testing with re-study and to examine the impact of these strategies according to the relative difficulty of the material (cue-target association strength) in two experiments. After a first encoding phase, participants re-studied, provided JOL, or took a test. Forty-eight hours later, they participated in a final cued-recall test, during which their confidence level judgments were collected. The main result was that delayed JOL behaved in the same way as testing, and both yielded better performances than re-study when material was of moderate difficulty. The easy or very difficult material revealed no differences between these strategies. JOL is proposed as an alternative to testing when faced with difficult material.