What constrains people’s ability to learn about the testing effect through task experience?

ABSTRACT

What constrains people’s ability to learn from experience about the effectiveness of practice testing versus restudying for memory (i.e., the testing effect)? Across two cycles, participants studied word pairs, practiced each pair through either restudying or testing, predicted how many pairs they would recall for each strategy, then completed a critical test on the pairs. During this test, participants either received feedback about the number of pairs they had correctly recalled or made postdictions about their performance for each strategy (i.e., generated their own feedback). During both cycles, participants predicted they would recall an equivalent number of tested and restudied pairs, although they actually recalled more tested pairs. However, when participants experienced a larger testing effect, they estimated recall performance more accurately for each strategy and updated their knowledge about the testing effect. Thus, peoples’ ability to learn from experience about the testing effect is primarily constrained not by a failure to initiate the metacognitive processes required to monitor and track recall performance by strategy, but by the metacognitive burden of discriminating between small differences in recall between tested versus restudied material. In summary, people can learn from experience about the testing effect when the metacognitive burden is lifted.

KEYWORDS:

• Testing effect
• metacognition
• monitoring
• knowledge updating
• feedback

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge Chris Hertzog and RADlab members for their helpful comments. We also thank Samantha Allen, Hannah Barringer, Tiara Bradford, Chris Gifford, Rachel Hall, Megan Hennessey, Jared Jenkins, Alex Knopps, Emily Moore, Abby O’Brien, Bailey Patouhas, and Olivia Yee for their assistance with data collection.

Consent to participate

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Data availability statement

Item-level data and word pairs used in all experiments are available at https://osf.io/qvhds/.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics approval

All three experiments reported here received approval from Kent State University’s Institutional Review Board.

Notes

1 Unfortunately, we are missing demographic data for this sample of participants.

2 We had planned to present feedback for 2 s, but due to an unfortunate coding error, feedback was only presented for 1 s in Experiment 1. This error was corrected in Experiments 2 and 3.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.