Interest and metacognition: The effectiveness of interest as a metacognitive monitoring process in metacognitive control

Althea Bauernschmidt, Purdue University

Abstract

In two experiments I investigated how students use interest and judgments of learning (JOLs) to monitor and control their learning of expository texts. Prior work has shown a positive relationship between interest and JOLs, suggesting that students feel they will recall more from interesting material (Bauernschmidt & Karpicke, in prep). The relationship between interest and JOLs creates conflicting predictions about how students will study. They may want to restudy an interesting text because it is interesting, but they are also confident they will recall more from that text and might not choose to restudy it. Experiment 1 was designed to assess the effect of interest on JOLs, restudy choice, and recall. Interest was a significant predictor of JOLs, and both JOLs and interest were significant predictors of restudy decisions. Only JOLs, however, had strong predictive validity for recall. In addition to exploring theoretical concerns, Experiment 1 was also designed to address some methodological concerns. Experiment 1 examined the validity of different ways of eliciting metacognitive judgments and the effect of restudy expectation on the restudy decision. Delayed rankings of interest judgments and JOLs were found to be similar to immediate ratings of those metacognitive judgments, and therefore valid ways of measuring interest and JOLs in future experiments. There was no evidence that restudy expectation affected how subjects made their restudy choices. Experiment 2 was designed to assess which restudy is more effective - a restudy strategy based on interest, on JOLs, or on whatever strategy students are already using. Students who used an interest based study strategy preformed better than students who used a JOL based strategy. Students who were allowed to use their own study strategy, however, were not significantly different from those that used an interest or a JOL strategy. The purpose of this dissertation was to investigate how interest affects students' ability to monitor and control their learning of expository texts. The experiments presented here demonstrated that students' restudy choices are influenced by interest and while recall of texts is not influenced by interest per se, restudying interesting texts can improve overall recall performance.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Karpicke, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Cognitive psychology

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