Photograph by Gary Harwood, '87
Dr. Katherine Rawson and Dr. John Dunlosky work with 5th graders in Kent State's AT&T classroom.
Learning in Jeopardy
Psychologists study how well we judge our own learning abilities
By Melissa Edler, M.A. '07Every day, people make judgments about how well they learn without even realizing it, whether it’s learning a new role as an employee, or mastering a hobby such as scuba diving or playing the guitar.
“People’s judgments about how well they have learned and comprehended text materials can be important for effectively regulating learning, but only if those judgments are accurate,” says Dr. John Dunlosky, Kent State professor of psychology and associate editor of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition.
Dunlosky and his colleague, Dr. Katherine Rawson, Kent State assistant professor of psychology, study “metacomprehension,” or the ability to judge one’s own comprehension and learning of text materials. Their research primarily focuses on middle-school and college students and how improving metacomprehension can, in turn, improve their ability to identify and address gaps in their learning.
Learning and Memory
With funding from the U.S. Department of Education, Dunlosky and Rawson have examined metacomprehension in fifth, seventh and eighth graders, as well as college-aged students. Given national mandates to “leave no child behind,” grade-school students are expected to learn a tremendous amount of class material in a limited amount of time, and such expectations follow many students through high school and college, says Dunlosky.
“Students have too much to learn, so it’s important they learn efficiently,” says Dunlosky, “but they also need to retain the information for the tests and beyond.” Particularly today, students are expected to understand and remember difficult concepts relevant to state achievement tests. However, a major challenge is the student’s ability to judge his own learning.
“Students are extremely overconfident about what they’re learning,” says Dunlosky. Adds Rawson, most instructors can relate instances of students coming to them after an exam, distraught because they received a low grade, but reporting, “I really studied and I was sure I knew everything!” She says: “This is a classic case of inaccurate metacomprehension.”
How can the issue be corrected?
“One relatively good way for someone to evaluate what they know is to self-test,” says Rawson. After reading or studying information, wait for a short time and then try to recall or summarize the information from memory. Next, check the information recalled against the original source material. “Our research consistently shows that without checking, people often believe they’ve remembered something correctly when in fact they haven’t,” says Rawson.
Currently, Dunlosky and Rawson are developing a “study buddy” guide that combines accurate monitoring with effective schedules of learning. “This ‘study buddy’ promises to support efficient and durable learning of key classroom concepts for students of all ages,” says Dunlosky. When the guide is completed, they hope to provide it to schools across the state of Ohio.
In addition to middle-school children, Dunlosky and Rawson also examine the relative accuracy of college students’ metacomprehension — that is, the degree to which a student’s judgments correlate with his or her own test performances across texts. In one study, they found that students are not very good at judging how well they understand texts, and when asked, they only guess accurately 15 percent above what they would guess correctly by random chance.
One factor that may contribute to this dilemma is that when people have minimal understanding of the text in the first place, they will have difficulties judging their learning and comprehension of the same texts. Based on these results, Dunlosky and Rawson have developed a process that uses monitoring techniques, such as rereading texts, which will allow students to gain a deeper understanding of the materials and improve their metacomprehension accuracy.
Metacomprehension in Older Adults
The same techniques that work for college students also are effective for older adults, says Dunlosky, who has extended his research to look at metacomprehension in adults 60 to 75 years old.
Aging adults often need to memorize complex texts such as medical information, describing the side effects of a drug. The cognition problem that people complain most about as they age is loss of memory, says Dunlosky. With almost 35 million adults aged 65 or older living in the United States, memory decline is a growing problem that deserves attention.
“On average, memory does decline as we get older, but that doesn’t mean we can’t improve our memory abilities with a little focused effort,” says Dunlosky.
In a recent Psychology and Aging study funded by the National Institute on Aging, Dunlosky and colleagues at Kent State and the Georgia Institute of Technology examined whether aging affects metacomprehension. They found that while judgments for both younger and older adults were significantly related to how easily they could process the information, the difference between the two groups did not differ significantly. Thus, aging does not seem to affect people’s ability to judge their own learning of text materials.
“This means that older adults can use their intact metacomprehension to help them compensate for any initial difficulties in learning, which is splendid,” says Dunlosky.
In the future, Dunlosky and Rawson plan to investigate individuals’ abilities to evaluate how well someone else understands or remembers information, such as how well a physician can evaluate whether her patient understands the information she’s providing.
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