The efficacy of learners' testing choices.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Educational Psychology
• Metacognition

Background:

• Practice testing offers significant mnemonic benefits compared to restudying.
• Learners often misjudge the effectiveness of practice testing, perceiving it as less beneficial than restudying.
• This metacognitive misjudgment leads to underutilization of testing strategies in self-regulated learning.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the effectiveness of learners' choices regarding practice testing versus restudying.
• To determine if honoring learners' study activity preferences enhances subsequent memory performance.
• To explore the metacognitive understanding learners have of testing effectiveness.

Main Methods:

• Participants studied word pairs and selected items for either restudying or practice testing.
• Learners' choices were sometimes honored and sometimes overridden (dishonored) to examine the impact of their decisions.
• Memory performance was assessed after study sessions where choices were manipulated.

Main Results:

• Honoring learners' choices about study activities consistently led to better memory performance than overriding their choices.
• This improvement occurred because learners tended to choose restudying for difficult items, which do not benefit as much from testing.
• Learners demonstrated an awareness of situations where testing benefits are minimal, even if they underestimate general testing benefits.

Conclusions:

• Learners' choices about study activities, particularly their selection of restudying for difficult items, can be effective for memory.
• Metacognitive monitoring of learning strategies, while imperfect, shows nuance in understanding the conditions under which different strategies are most beneficial.
• The findings challenge previous assumptions about the metacognition of testing and highlight the importance of considering learner agency in study design.