Do Students Effectively Regulate Their Use of Self-Testing as a Function of Item Difficulty?

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Educational Psychology
• Learning Sciences

Background:

• Retrieval practice enhances learning for materials of varying difficulty.
• Limited research exists on students' self-testing strategies for items of differing difficulty levels.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if students regulate self-testing differently for easy versus difficult learning items.
• To assess the effectiveness of students' self-regulated learning choices in practice.

Main Methods:

• Undergraduates studied Lithuanian-English word pairs, categorized as easy or difficult.
• Participants in self-regulated groups chose between restudying, self-testing, or removing items.
• Scaffolds were introduced in Experiment 2 to address potential regulation barriers.

Main Results:

• Students tested items repeatedly but dropped both easy and difficult items after one correct recall.
• Final test performance was lower for difficult items than easy items.
• Self-regulated learning groups showed lower performance than experimenter-controlled groups; scaffolds did not alter choices or outcomes.

Conclusions:

• Students' self-regulated practice choices do not optimize learning, particularly for difficult material.
• Despite intentions, students do not practice difficult items more than easy items, leading to performance deficits.
• Current self-testing strategies may be insufficient for mastering challenging academic content.