Abstract
When people make judgments of learning (JOLs) after studying paired associates, the process they engage in to monitor their learning can directly enhance learning for some types of material (Soderstrom et al. 2015). The current experiments investigated whether JOLs directly enhance learning educationally relevant texts. Across 5 experiments (N = 703), people read several sections of an educational textbook with or without JOLs embedded between each section. We manipulated whether JOLs queried one’s understanding of the text at the aggregate level (Experiment 1) or for specific concepts in the text (Experiment 2a, 2b, 3, and 4). We also manipulated whether JOLs were framed to afford covert retrieval practice by prompting judgments with either the target information present or absent (Experiment 3). In most cases, instructing students to make JOLs did not improve comprehension above and beyond just reading the text. However, when people were instructed to retrieve information prior to making JOLs (Experiment 4), large learning gains occurred. These results indicate that JOLs in their standard form are unlikely to produce educational benefits to text comprehension in part because learners do not spontaneously retrieve criterial information when making metacomprehension judgments. © 2020, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.