Nate Kornell

Self-Regulated Learning: Beliefs, Techniques, and Illusions

Knowing how to manage ones own learning has become increasingly important in recent years, as both the need and the opportunities for individuals to learn on their own outside of formal classroom settings have grown. During that same period, however, research on learning, memory, and metacognitive processes has provided evidence that people often have a faulty mental model of how they learn and remember, making them prone to both misassessing and mismanaging their own learning. After a discussion of what learners need to understand in order to become effective stewards of their own learning, we first review research on what people believe about how they learn and then review research on how peoples ongoing assessments of their own learning are influenced by current performance and the subjective sense of fluency. We conclude with a discussion of societal assumptions and attitudes that can be counterproductive in terms of individuals becoming maximally effective learners.

Transfer of Metacognitive Skills and Hint Seeking in Monkeys

Metacognition is knowledge that can be expressed as confidence judgments about what one knows (monitoring) and by strategies for learning what one does not know (control). Although there is a substantial literature on cognitive processes in animals, little is known about their metacognitive abilities. Here we show that rhesus macaques, trained previously to make retrospective confidence judgments about their performance on perceptual tasks, transferred that ability immediately to a new perceptual task and to a working memory task. We also show that monkeys can learn to request “hints” when they are given problems that they would otherwise have to solve by trial and error. This study demonstrates, for the first time, that nonhuman primates share with humans the ability to monitor and transfer their metacognitive ability both within and between different cognitive tasks, and to seek new knowledge on a need-to-know basis.

The Promise and Perils of Self-Regulated Study

Self-regulated study involves many decisions, some of which people make confidently and easily (if not always optimally) and others of which are involved and difficult. Good study decisions rest on accurate monitoring of ongoing learning, a realistic mental model of how learning happens, and appropriate use of study strategies. We review our research on the decisions people make, for better or worse, when deciding what to study, how long to study, and how to study.

The Dynamics of Learning and Allocation of Study Time to a Region of Proximal Learning

In contrast to the dominant discrepancy reduction model, which favors the most difficult items, people, given free choice, devoted most time to medium-difficulty items and studied the easiest items first. When study time was experimentally manipulated, best performance resulted when most time was given to the medium-difficulty items. Empirically determined information uptake functions revealed steep initial learning for easy items with little subsequent increase. For medium-difficulty items, initial gains were smaller but more sustained, suggesting that the strategy people had used, when given free choice, was largely appropriate. On the basis of the information uptake functions, a negative spacing effect was predicted and observed in the final experiment. Overall, the results favored the region of proximal learning framework.

The pretesting effect: Do unsuccessful retrieval attempts enhance learning?

Testing previously studied information enhances long-term memory, particularly when the information is successfully retrieved from memory. The authors examined the effect of unsuccessful retrieval attempts on learning. Participants in 5 experiments read an essay about vision. In the test condition, they were asked about embedded concepts before reading the passage; in the extended study condition, they were given a longer time to read the passage. To distinguish the effects of testing from attention direction, the authors emphasized the tested concepts in both conditions, using italics or bolded keywords or, in Experiment 5, by presenting the questions but not asking participants to answer them before reading the passage. Posttest performance was better in the test condition than in the extended study condition in all experiments--a pretesting effect--even though only items that were not successfully retrieved on the pretest were analyzed. The testing effect appears to be attributable, in part, to the role unsuccessful tests play in enhancing future learning.

A Stability Bias in Human Memory: Overestimating Remembering and Underestimating Learning

The dynamics of human memory are complex and often unintuitive, but certain features--such as the fact that studying results in learning--seem like common knowledge. In 12 experiments, however, participants who were told they would be allowed to study a list of word pairs between 1 and 4 times and then take a cued-recall test predicted little or no learning across trials, notwithstanding their large increases in actual learning. When queried directly, the participants espoused the belief that studying results in learning, but they showed little evidence of that belief in the actual task. These findings, when combined with A. Koriat, R. A. Bjork, L. Sheffer, and S. K. Bars (2004) research on judgments of forgetting, suggest a stability bias in human memory--that is, a tendency to assume that the accessibility of ones memories will remain relatively stable over time rather than benefiting from future learning or suffering from future forgetting.

Learners’ choices and beliefs about self-testing

Students have to make scores of practical decisions when they study. We investigated the effectiveness of, and beliefs underlying, one such practical decision: the decision to test oneself while studying. Using a flashcards-like procedure, participants studied lists of word pairs. On the second of two study trials, participants either saw the entire pair again (pair mode) or saw the cue and attempted to generate the target (test mode). Participants were asked either to rate the effectiveness of each study mode (Experiment 1) or to choose between the two modes (Experiment 2). The results demonstrated a mismatch between metacognitive beliefs and study choices: Participants (incorrectly) judged that the pair mode resulted in the most learning, but chose the test mode most frequently. A post-experimental questionnaire suggested that self-testing was motivated by a desire to diagnose learning rather than a desire to improve learning.

The spacing effect in children’s memory and category induction

The spacing effect describes the robust phenomenon whereby memory is enhanced when learning events are distributed, instead of being presented in succession. We investigated the effect of spacing on childrens memory and category induction. Three-year-old children were presented with two tasks, a memory task and a category induction task. In the memory task, identical instances of an object were presented and then tested in a multiple choice test. In the category induction task, different instances of a category were presented and tested in a multiple choice test. In both tasks, presenting the instances in a spaced sequence resulted in more learning than presenting the instances in a massed sequence, despite the difficulty created by the spaced sequence. The spaced sequence increased the difficulty of the task by allowing children time to forget the previous instance during the spaced interval.

The Ease-of-Processing Heuristic and the Stability Bias Dissociating Memory, Memory Beliefs, and Memory Judgments

Judgments about memory are essential in promoting knowledge; they help identify trustworthy memories and predict what information will be retained in the future. In the three experiments reported here, we investigated the mechanisms underlying predictions about memory. In Experiments 1 and 2, single words were presented once or multiple times, in large or small type. There was a double dissociation between actual memory and predicted memory: Type size affected predicted but not actual memory, and future study opportunities affected actual memory but scarcely affected predicted memory. The results of Experiment 3 suggest that beliefs and judgments are largely independent, and neither consistently resembles actual memory. Participants’ underestimation of future learning—a stability bias—stemmed from an overreliance on their current memory state in making predictions about future memory states. The overreliance on type size highlights the fundamental importance of the ease-of-processing heuristic: Information that is easy to process is judged to have been learned well.

Why interleaving enhances inductive learning: The roles of discrimination and retrieval

Kornell and Bjork (Psychological Science 19:585–592, 2008) found that interleaving exemplars of different categories enhanced inductive learning of the concepts based on those exemplars. They hypothesized that the benefit of mixing exemplars from different categories is that doing so highlights differences between the categories. Kang and Pashler (Applied Cognitive Psychology 26:97–103, 2012) obtained results consistent with this discriminative-contrast hypothesis: Interleaving enhanced inductive learning, but temporal spacing, which does not highlight category differences, did not. We further tested the discriminative-contrast hypothesis by examining the effects of interleaving and spacing, as well as their combined effects. In three experiments, using photographs of butterflies and birds as the stimuli, temporal spacing was harmful when it interrupted the juxtaposition of interleaved categories, even when total spacing was held constant, supporting the discriminative-contrast hypothesis. Temporal spacing also had value, however, when it did not interrupt discrimination processing.