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The article focuses on various ideas for teachers to provide notes for students in secondary schools. Topics include reviewing notes in classes to solve their problems; providing skeletal outline in notes to capture the important topics; and highlighting the significant contents present in notes during lectures.

Testing is a potent learning tool, but how do students use testing across multiple study sessions? In two studies, we investigated students’ use of testing to learn course materials for a high-stakes exam across four sessions. Of primary interest was (a) whether students used self-testing similarly across sessions and (b) whether students used self-testing to reach high levels of retrieval success across sessions. In each session, students learned the same key-concept definitions with the options to test, study (Studies 1 and 2), or judge the quality of their recall responses (Study 2). In earlier sessions, students relied less on testing than studying. In subsequent sessions—when students had better learned the concepts—they relied more on testing (relative to studying), presumably to evaluate their learning progress. Furthermore, students used testing and studying to successfully retrieve the concepts within each session and hence reached high levels of retrieval success across sessions.

Even though retrieval practice typically has a robust, positive influence on memory, response format (overt vs. covert retrieval) may moderate its effect when students learn complex material. Overt retrieval is likely to promote exhaustive retrieval, whereas covert retrieval may not be exhaustive for familiar key terms. In two experiments, students were instructed to study key-term definitions and were asked to practice retrieval overtly, to practice retrieval covertly, or to restudy the definitions. Students also made metacognitive judgments. A final criterion test was administered two days later. Students’ final recall was greater after overt retrieval practice than after covert retrieval practice or restudy, with a continuously cumulating meta-analysis establishing the effect as moderate in size (pooled d=0.43). Thus, response format does matter for learning definitions of key terms, supporting the recommendation that students use overt retrieval when using retrieval practice as a strategy to learn complex materials.

Taking tests on to-be-learned material is one of the most powerful learning strategies available to students. We examined the magnitude and mechanisms of the testing effect in college students with (n= 25) and without (n= 75) attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder by comparing the effect of practice testing versus a comparable amount of restudy on long-term recall. Participants learned two lists of 48 words representing eight categories—one via eight consecutive study trials and another via four alternating study and test trials—and took recall tests 2 days later. Both groups demonstrated a moderate testing effect (ds = 0.50, 0.57), and testing improved memory by enhancing both relational and item-specific processing. Results support the use of test-enhanced learning to promote the academic achievement of college students with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and the inclusion of self-testing strategies into skills-based interventions for this population.

Abstract.The positive effect of delayed retrieval practice on subsequent test performance is robust; by contrast, making delayed judgments of learning (JOLs) encourages covert retrieval but has a minor influence on final test performance. In three experiments, we experimentally established and explored this memory-metamemory paradox. After initial study of paired associates (e.g., husky – ram), participants either were explicitly tested (husky – ?) or made a JOL. In Experiment 1, we adopted the standard JOL method, using a short retention interval, whereas in Experiments 2 and 3, we used a common testing-effect method involving a longer retention interval. Delayed JOLs did not boost test performance, but explicit delayed tests boosted memory after a longer retention interval. As important, participants spent less time to make JOLs than to retrieve responses. These data indicate that differences in the dynamics of retrieval for practice tests versus delayed JOLs are responsible for the paradox.

•Investigated the influence of testing with feedback on 5th graders learning of science concepts.•Across all four conditions, final test performance was low.•Final test performance was best for concepts that had been tested with feedback.

How do learners decide whether to mass or space an item during study? Results from Son (2004) indicate that these decisions are influenced by the degree to which an item is judged to be encoded sufficiently during an initial study episode, whereas others (Toppino, Cohen, Davis, & Moors, 2009) have proposed that degraded perceptual processing contributed to participants’ decisions to mass or space study. To reconcile these conflicting conclusions, the current experiments used eye tracking technology to evaluate the contribution of degraded perception and insufficient encoding on learners’ study decisions. Participants studied synonym pairs from the graduate record exam (GRE) that varied in item difficulty for 1 s (Experiment 1) or 5 s (Experiment 2) each while their eye movements were recorded. Participants then decided whether to mass, space, or drop each pair in future study. For pairs that were never fixated, and hence not perceived, participants overwhelmingly chose to mass their study, presumably so that they could read the target. For pairs that were processed sufficiently to be perceived, preference for massing and spacing pairs increased with item difficulty (i.e., both increased as pairs became less likely to be fully encoded). Taken together, these data demonstrate a contribution of degraded perception and insufficient encoding for learners’ decisions to mass (or space) their study.

The article explores learning techniques. For more than 100 years, cognitive and educational psychologists have developed and studied several learning techniques including re-reading, summarizing and self-testing. Practice testing was found to be useful among pre-schoolers to fourth year medical students on all kinds of factual information, including learning a foreign language. Rereading was found to be the least effective among the said techniques, particularly imagery for text learning.

Background and aims:Many studies have focused on memory training in aging, showing that older adults can improve their performance. Unfortunately, the benefits of training can rarely be generalized to other tasks for which adults were not specifically trained. We investigated the benefits of instructionbased training in promoting transfer effects in older adults. Methods:In Experiment 1, we evaluated transfer effects in a training group who practiced using standard mnemonics to learn paired associates and word lists, and this group was given instructions about how the mnemonics could be used for two of the four transfer tasks (text learning, name-face learning, grocery list learning, place learning). In Experiment 2, we compared transfer effects for two different training groups: one practiced the strategies with the two trained tasks and did not receive instructions, and the other had the same practice but also received instructions on all the transfer tasks. Results:Transfer in text learning occurred in both experiments. This transfer is particularly interesting, as text learning was the most dissimilar task in terms of both the nature of the materials and the underlying processes that support performance. The transfer was reliably greater when training involved instructions about applicability than when it did not. Conclusions:Instructions to use practiced strategies on new materials may be a useful technique in promoting transfer in older adults. It seems that the lack of transfer does not necessarily arise from older adults’ inabilities, but because they do not realize that trained strategies can (or should) be applied to new materials.

Why do students have difficulties judging the correctness of information they recall (e.g., definitions of key concepts in textbooks), and how can students improve their judgement accuracy? To answer these questions, we had college students read six expository passages, each including four key terms with definitions. After reading a text, each key term was presented, and participants (a) attempted to recall the corresponding definition and (b) self-scored the correctness of the response (incorrect, partially correct, or entirely correct). Participants were overconfident, with inflated judgements for responses that were objectively incorrect. When participants could inspect correct definitions while judging their responses, judgement accuracy improved. Counterintuitively, however, some overconfidence remained. We discuss implications of these results for theory, education, and the two questions posed above.

Abstract: In two experiments, we investigated momentary accessibility as a basis for metacomprehension judgments. Momentary accessibility has been cited as a major contributor to these judgments, yet the only previous investigation on the topic used judgments that were delayed a day after study, which have not been used in any other studies in the field and may be necessary for demonstrating accessibility-based effects. As expected, Experiment 1 demonstrated that the time between study and judgments moderates accessibility effects, with the relationship between judgments and access measures being substantially greater for delayed than for immediate judgments. Experiment 2 ruled out a plausible artifactual interpretation for accessibility effects on delayed judgments. In the discussion, we explore why study—judgment lags moderate accessibility effects.

When predicting future performance on tests over text material, do individuals estimate retention in addition to assessing comprehension? In Experiment 1, participants either rated their comprehension or predicted performance for each text, with lower ratings indicating lower confidence either in comprehension or in eventual performance. Judgement magnitude was significantly lower for performance predictions than for comprehension ratings, suggesting that predictions were based partly on retention estimates. In Experiment 2, predictions varied with anticipated test delay (15 min or 2 weeks) whereas comprehension ratings did not, providing further evidence that individuals estimate retention when predicting performance. Analyses of individual differences suggest that both good and poor performers incorporate retention estimates when predicting performance, but better performers do so in a more discriminative manner. Implications for theory of metacognitive judgements are discussed.

Previous research has shown that writers and editors of all ages and abilities have trouble correcting errors in texts. In this study, we were interested in discovering whether people do not correct these errors mainly because (1) they do not have the knowledge to correct them, or because (2) even though they do have the knowledge to correct the errors, they do not use it. The first case would point to aknowledge deficit, or a deficit at the cognitive level; the second case would point to aprocessing deficit, or a deficit at the metacognitive level. The study compared the number and type of implanted errors corrected by high school and college subjects working on two different texts under three different conditions. We found that, for both ages, the biggest stumbling block in correcting errors was not the knowledge of how to correct them, but rather a failure to detect them: They did not use their available knowledge to find the errors. This processing deficit may be the result of a dearth of available error-finding strategies, or knowledge may not be activated because of lack of motivation or because of a failure to perceive the nature of the task.

The relative roles of acquisition and forgetting in mediating age-related differences in multitrial learning were evaluated by having 258 adults (18 to 94 years of age) complete five study and free-recall test trials of 15 words. Performance across trials was decomposed into (a) gained access, corresponding to the proportion of items recalled on trial n+1 of those that were not recalled on trial n (hence tapping processes related to acquisition), and (b) lost access, corresponding to the proportion of items not recalled on trial n+1 of those that were recalled on trial n (hence tapping intertrial forgetting). Age-related differences occurred both in gained access and in lost access, although acquisition seemed to play a larger role in mediating age-related differences in learning than did forgetting. Also, a composite measure of processing speed shared 63% or more of the age-related variance in measures of free recall. the overall pattern of results is consistent with the view that age-related decreases in the speed of completing elementary encoding operations contribute to poorer learning by leading to weaker representations of the to-be-remembered items.

No normative data have been available for the recall of recently studied foreign-language vocabulary items. We report data from 200 university undergraduates who had three study-recall trials on Swahili-English translation equivalents (e.g. ardhi-soil). Performance on each of the three study-recall trials is reported for each of the 100 items. Recall varied from near-zero to near-perfect across the combinations of items and trials, thereby allowing investigators to choose combinations of items and trials that will produce any desired range of recall difficulty. Substantial improvements in recall of the items occurred across study-test trials, and therefore the items seem suitable both for investigations of the effect of acquisition variables and for most of the other goals that are satisfied by laboratory paired-associate items.

► Some learning techniques (explanatory questioning, distributed practice, and retrieval practice) show promise for improving student grades. ► Despite the promise of explanatory questioning, further research is needed to establish its efficacy in the classroom. ► Distributed and retrieval practice are effective and future research can focus on improving their efficacy through successive relearning.

Highlights? Metacognitive self-regulation involves a reciprocal interaction between monitoring cognition and controlling it through action. ? Older adults are at risk for cognitive failures unless they engage in effective proactive compensation for mechanistic decline. ? Simple methods for enhancing older adults’ everyday cognition are available and can be trained ? Training is most likely to be effective if it encourages mindful evaluation of how to adapt strategies to fit contexts to achieve goals. ? Lack of transfer of strategy training may be due to a lack of attention to explicitly training strategy generalization.

Objective.To provide a user’s guide on measuring metacognition in authentic contexts so that educators and researchers can explore students’ metacognition with an aim towards improving their students’ metacognitive processes and achievement.