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Prior experience shapes metacognitive judgments at the category level: the role of testing and category difficulty

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Abstract

Most metacognition research has focused on aggregate judgments of overall performance or item-level judgments about performance on particular questions. However, metacognitive judgments at the category level, which have not been as extensively explored, also play a role in students’ study strategies, for example, when students determine what topics to study for an exam. We investigated whether category learning judgments (CLJs) were sensitive to differences in the difficulty of general knowledge categories. After either studying or being tested on facts from several categories (e.g., Shakespeare, Astronomy), participants estimated the likelihood that they could correctly answer new questions from those categories on a later test (i.e., they made CLJs). Results of two studies showed that CLJs were sensitive to differences in category difficulty. Further, participants gave lower or more conservative CLJs when they took an initial test as compared to studying questions from the categories. Results are discussed in terms of the value and relevance of CLJs both in educational settings and in theories of metacognition.

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Notes

  1. Normative data was calculated using mean performance from an average of 290 participants who answered these same questions across a series of pilot experiments using trivia categories. In the pilot studies, the questions were always new to the experiment (i.e., participants has not encountered the question or answer previously) and presented in the same session as other questions from the same categories.

  2. Higher proportion correct on the final test may be due to prior exposure to different questions from the same categories that participants previewed in the initial study/test phase.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Grant 22020166, Applying Cognitive Psychology to Enhance Educational Practice, from the James S. McDonnell Foundation, awarded to Larry L. Jacoby. We are grateful to Chris Wahlheim for his input the procedure as well as Rachel Teune and Kara Chung for their assistance with data collection and data scoring.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Hendrix College, 1600 Washington Avenue, Conway, AR, 72034, USA

    Ruthann C. Thomas

  2. Educational Testing Service, 660 Rosedale Road, Princeton, NJ, 08541, USA

    Bridgid Finn

  3. Department of Psychology, Washington University in St. Louis, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, 63130, USA

    Larry L. Jacoby

Authors
  1. Ruthann C. Thomas
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  2. Bridgid Finn
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  3. Larry L. Jacoby
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Correspondence to Ruthann C. Thomas.

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Thomas, R.C., Finn, B. & Jacoby, L.L. Prior experience shapes metacognitive judgments at the category level: the role of testing and category difficulty. Metacognition Learning 11, 257–274 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11409-015-9144-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11409-015-9144-4

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