R3 4.7 August 3, 2026 What Do You Know? Judging Your Own Learning Doesn’t Always Improve It

Pausing to evaluate your level of learning is a classic metacognitive move, but might not benefit memory directly

This issue’s focus article concentrates on one highly specific study-relate activity: making judgments of learning, or JOLs. Usually taking the form of a quick percentage-style or sliding-scale rating, JOLs ask the learner to estimate how well they know something, their confidence in being able to answer a future test question correctly, or similar self-report. Numerous research studies incorporate JOLs as key measurements in their designs, using it as one way to track learning in close-to-real time.

JOLs can also serve a practical, strategic purpose – helping students decide where to concentrate more of their efforts going forward. Similarly, in a digital learning environment, these inputs can be incredibly useful for plotting out a personalized set of next steps. Thus, self-checks of various kinds are a frequent component of educational technologies, from today’s best flashcard applications going all the way back to the first large-scale personalized courseware systems like the Open Learning Initiative.

But besides being an important practical tool, JOLs can also serve as learning interventions in their own right. As with the testing effect – benefits to recall that happen when people answer test questions or engage in other forms of retrieval practice – JOLs might be a case where measuring something changes the thing being measured.

One way this could happen is through cue strengthening, explained in the article as something that happens as learners seek out the linkages between two related concepts, and reflect on those connections as they work to make a JOL-style estimate of future recall. The authors offer the example of learning the definition of “social norms.” Those words meaningfully connect to different components of the definition (norms play out in social situations, norms involve appropriate or conventional social behavior, and so on). Activating these individual connections during the JOL process strengthens each one individually, resulting in a more robust set of associations that support the ability to later on state the definition when presented with the term.

This process may be why, according to the article, the benefits of JOLs appear the most consistently in the case of conceptually coherent material, such as key terms that have clear associations with their definitions. Studies that look at classic paired associations between random words (social norms -> cloud) tend to find no benefit, or even a disadvantage, when JOLs are introduced.

The cue strengthening explanation sounds plausible enough, but as the article points out, it’s no slam dunk. In fact, there’s a counter-mechanism that predicts worse retention when JOLs are in play. Because you do, in fact, have to stop, think, and respond in order to make a JOL, doing so introduces dual-task demands. In other words, making a JOL potentially creates a distraction and introduces switch costs as the learner gets back into the flow of the material. So if JOLs are to produce any overall beneficial effects via cue strengthening (or any other mechanism), those benefits must be powerful enough to overcome the dual-task costs.

Between both of these possibilities is yet another potential side effect of JOLs, this time having to do with metacognition itself. On the face of it, JOLs seem like a powerful way to help students develop the habit of consciously checking in with themselves to monitor as they study – a hallmark of self-regulated learning. Even better, if they take the time to compare their original JOL with actual performance later on, they’ll get more accurate in evaluating their progress as they go.

Attention versus metacognition is an intriguing tradeoff, to be sure, and one that this article sheds light on (along with other practical issues) via a task that mirrors one of the foundational components of many college courses: key terms, or definitions paired with vocabulary items.

Citation:

Witherby, A. E., Tauber, S. K., & Elsden, A. (2026). Do judgments of learning have reactive effects on learning of key-term definitions? Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. Advance online publication.

DOI:

https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/mac0000282

Paywall or Open:

Paywall

Summary:

Across three experiments, researchers tested whether whether making judgments of learning, or JOLs, directly improves memory for key terms and definitions. Participants studied social psychology terms and definitions, with some making JOLs and others only studying. Variations on the task included standard prediction-style JOLs, idea-unit JOLs (in which participants rated each component of the question), elaborative JOLs (in which they gave a reason for the JOL), and target-absent JOLs (where the definition wasn’t visible as the JOL was being made). None significantly improved recall nor were there trends in that direction. The authors conclude that JOLs may still help students monitor and regulate their studying, but they do not appear to directly strengthen learning of key-term definitions.

Research Questions:

Do judgments of learning directly improve students’ learning of key terms and definitions?

Do modified JOL procedures, such as idea-unit JOLs, elaborative JOLs, or target-absent JOLs, produce different effects compared to standard JOLs?

Sample:

All participants were undergraduate students completing the studies for course credit. Experiment 1 N = 143; Experiment 2 N = 162; Experiment 3 N = 159. Across experiments, most participants identified as women and mean ages ranged between 19 and 21.

Method/Design:

For each experiment, participants studied eight social psychology key terms and then completed a cued recall test (i.e., filling in the definition when presented with the term). Participants were randomly assigned to experimental conditions.

In Experiment 1, participants first completed two familiarity phases in which they studied each term and definition. They then completed a study phase in one of three conditions. The no-JOL group restudied the terms and definitions. The standard JOL group studied each pair and then predicted, on a 0% to 100% scale, how likely they would be to recall the definition later when given the term. The idea-unit JOL group made separate JOLs for each idea unit within a definition. In Experiment 2, the idea-unit JOL condition was replaced with an elaborative JOL condition in which participants made a standard JOL and then explained why they gave that rating. In Experiment 3 the initial familiarity phases were removed. creating a procedure closer to the typical JOL reactivity paradigm. Participants were assigned to a no-JOL group, a target-present JOL group, or a target-absent JOL group. In the target-present condition, participants made their JOL while both the term and definition remained visible. In the target-absent condition, they made their JOL while the term was visible but the definition was not.

Key Findings:

Across all three experiments, there was no effect of making JOLs on the accuracy of the definitions recalled by participants. This pattern held for standard JOLs, idea-unit JOLs, elaborative JOLs, and target-absent JOLs. It also remained when the authors controlled for participants’ prior exposure to social psychology and familiarity with the specific terms. The authors argue that JOLs remain useful as a metacognitive tool because they can help students monitor learning and guide later study decisions, even if they do not directly boost memory for this kind of material.

Choice Quote from the Article:

These findings are important for informing educational practices. Specifically, prior research has demonstrated that JOLs are a valuable tool that students can use to monitor their learning. Moreover, JOLs can indirectly benefit learning via their role in monitoring (for a review, see Dunlosky & Ariel, 2011). That is, students can use cues about the to-be-learned materials (e.g., item difficulty) to inform their JOLs. They can then use their JOLs to strategically regulate their study decisions (e.g., spend more time studying items judged as more difficult), which can influence their memory for the material. Thus, JOLs can still have a positive indirect benefit on learning.

Why it Matters:

Given how common JOLs are as a feature of courseware systems, and how well they integrate into retrieval practice and flashcard study, it is important to understand their limitations. Notably, the null effects reported don’t appear to be a case of real differences being obscured by noise in the data or failing to attain significance due to too-small sample sizes. The authors report a scrupulous process of planning appropriate sample sizes through power analysis, along with going above and beyond in their statistical testing. Simple visual inspection of the means, as well, suggests that there is flatly no difference at all across conditions: no advantage, no disadvantage. That latter point does also suggest that the dual-task demands of making JOLs - while they do probably exist - aren’t substantial enough to matter.

The article presents an interesting discussion, as a side note, on the phenomenon of covert retrieval practice – essentially, mentally retrieving something from memory without deliberately intending to or in the absence of direct instructions to remember. This is what the target-absent condition was intended to probe, given that participants had the opportunity (but not the direct instruction) to try to retrieve the definition as they made the JOL. What I took away is that covert retrieval practice probably isn’t that effective, at least for this kind of material – another argument for deliberately teaching students about it and setting up activities in a way that clearly pushes them to explicitly retrieve as they go.

The explanation for why JOLs only really work at all for learning connected, non-random associations also struck me as a good reminder that even solid knowledge-building techniques won’t create learning when students are essentially just linking random words. I’d predict that the best of these techniques really take off when students are using them to build up coherent patterns of linkages among conceptually related items.

Most Relevant For: Courseware and technology designers; faculty and staff creating study skills advice; researchers interested in metacognition and memory; faculty teaching courses with a heavy emphasis on key terms and vocabulary

Limitations, Caveats, and Nagging Questions:

The target-present vs. target-absent comparison is interesting from a theoretical perspective, and (as mentioned above) sheds some light on covert retrieval as a factor in JOLs. But I doubt that it’s that salient for instructors looking to apply JOLs in a practical setting.

Also, it’s important to keep in mind that the findings presumably only apply to key term learning – don’t want to over-extend this to more conceptual material or other completely different sorts of content or skills students might learn. That said, I would have liked a more extensive discussion of what it is about key terms that undercut the direct benefits of JOLs.

It’s also interesting that given the pattern of solidly null findings, the authors still conclude that JOLs are worthwhile. There is the metacognition angle, through which students should build up a better understanding of how to predict and attain success. But, it’s still a bit jarring to try to square the total absence of improvement, from a memory standpoint, with the recommendation to continue incorporating JOLs into various kinds of learning tasks. I don’t disagree with the recommendations exactly, but this study struck me as a departure from the straightforward A to B to C reasoning we would typically see in this kind of research.

Similarly, I am not sure I came away with a clearer sense of how much these results represent a departure from earlier findings. The literature on JOLs may not be vast, as the article implies – but it does exist, and I wanted more as far as reconciling what these authors found and what previous studies of, e.g., cue strengthening found.

If you liked this article, you might also appreciate:

Chew, S. L., & Cerbin, W. J. (2021). The cognitive challenges of effective teaching. Journal of Economic Education, 52(1), 17–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220485.2020.1845266

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Supplement, 14(1), 4–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612453266

Halamish, V., & Undorf, M. (2023). Why do judgments of learning modify memory? Evidence from identical pairs and relatedness judgments. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 49(4), 547–556. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001174

Ingendahl, F., Halamish, V., & Undorf, M. (2025). Do immediate judg- ments of learning alter memory performance? A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 151(7), 892–929. https://doi.org/10.1037/bu l0000487

Kornell, N., & Bjork, R. A. (2007). The promise and perils of self-regulated study. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14(January), 219–224. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194055

Kubik, V., Koslowski, K., Schubert, T., & Aslan, A. (2022). Metacognitive judgments can potentiate new learning: The role of covert retrieval. Metacognition and Learning, 17(3), 1057–1077. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11409-022-09307-w

McDaniel, M. A., Einstein, G. O., & Een, E. (2021). Training college students to use learning strategies: A framework and pilot course. Psychology Learning and Teaching, 20(3), 364–382. https://doi.org/10.1177/1475725721989489

Melisa, E., Shawn, Y. C., & Haley, G. (2024). Effect of instruction and experience on students ’ learning strategies. Metacognition and Learning, (0123456789). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11409-023-09372-9

Miller, M.D. (2014). Minds online: Teaching effectively with technology. Harvard University Press.

File under: metacognition, judgments of learning, study strategies, key term learning