UC Merced

Can students accurately judge the rate of their learning? Relative rates of return are important when allocating time in various tasks, such as information gathering (Pirolli, 2005) and task switching (Payne, Duggan, and Neth, 2007). Rates of learning may be informative when allocating study time across various materials, and students' judgments of their learning rate has been proposed as a possible metacognitive tool (Metcalfe and Kornell, 2003). In this study, we investigated the accuracy of these judgments by asking students to estimate how much they improved between presentations in multi-trial learning situations, where they memorized n-gram paragraphs (in Experiments 1 and 2) or lists of word pairs (Experiment 3). In the first experiment, participants were asked to rate their improvement on a percentage scale, while on the second two, judgments were given on a 0 - 6 scale. Results from the experiments indicated that participants were unable to assess improvement with either scale, and while their judgments of improvement were correlated with changes in judgments of learning, that was not a reliable indicator of actual improvement.