Abstract
In an experiment with 56 young adults, the hypothesis was tested that information about the format of an anticipated test improves metacognitive monitoring. Half of the participants were informed about the format of the test before they started studying a text about human genetics. The other half of the sample received the same information after studying the text. All participants then answered 15 true-false inference items about the contents of the text and judged their confidence in the correctness of each answer. Whereas experimental and control group did not differ in the number of correct answers, the confidence judgments in the experimental group were more accurate and discriminated better between correct and incorrect answers than the control participants’ judgments. Furthermore, the informed participants’ discrimination performance correlated positively with their domain-related prior knowledge. The results extend earlier findings concerning the role of the test format for monitoring processes.
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Notes
The reduced number of degrees of freedom was due to cases in which Phi could not be computed because one of the two variables had no variance.
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Thanks are due to Timo Berse for supportive discussions and for helping to score the prior knowledge tests.
Appendix
Appendix
List of Concepts in the Test of Prior Knowledge
Text-related concepts (appearing in the text):
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enzyme, gene, chromosome, mutation, symptom
Domain-related concepts (not appearing in the text):
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haemoglobin, emulsifier, photosynthesis, endorphin, symbiosis
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Dutke, S., Barenberg, J. & Leopold, C. Learning from text: knowing the test format enhanced metacognitive monitoring. Metacognition Learning 5, 195–206 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11409-010-9057-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11409-010-9057-1