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Updated: Sep 30, 2025

Problem-Solving Before Instruction PS-I: A Protocol for Assessment and Intervention in Students with Different Abilities
Published on: September 11, 2021
Do Students Effectively Regulate Their Use of Self-Testing as a Function of Item Difficulty?
Sabrina Badali1, Katherine A Rawson1, John Dunlosky1
1Department of Psychological Sciences, Kent State University, P.O. Box 5190, Kent, OH 44242-0001 USA.
Students self-testing learning materials do not effectively regulate practice for difficult items, leading to poorer recall compared to easier items. This self-regulated learning approach underperformed compared to experimenter-controlled methods.
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.

