Abstract
Making judgments of learning (JOLs) can improve learning for some types of materials (e.g., related word pairs), an effect dubbed positive JOL reactivity. This finding could have important educational implications if it generalizes to more educationally realistic materials. Few researchers have investigated this possibility. The goal of the present experiments was to add to this area of research by exploring whether making JOLs would directly improve students’ learning of key terms and their definitions. Students studied key term and definition pairs. Some students only studied the pairs, and some studied the pairs and made a JOL (predicting the likelihood of future recall) for each. As well, some students made idea-unit JOLs (Experiment 1), engaged in metacognitive reflection for their JOLs (Experiment 2), or made target-absent JOLs (Experiment 3). In all experiments, JOLs did not impact memory. Thus, JOLs do not appear to impact students’ learning of key terms and definitions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: journal abstract)