Complex relations between metacognitive judgment and metacognitive control in self-regulated learning

This study explores whether and how the relationship between metacognitive monitoring and metacognitive control in self-regulated learning (SRL) is associated with personal factors such as motivation, personal epistemology, metacognitive awareness, and other individual difference variables. An eye tracking system was used to accurately capture data pertaining to metacognitive monitoring and control in SRL processes while participants studied then restudied some basic concepts of Number Theory using gStudy, a multi-featured software learning tool. This study yielded three significant findings. First, 37 of the 75 participants allocated more restudy time to information they judged not well learned, and 38 people allocated more restudy time to information they judged well learned. This result is not aligned with the dominant model of metacognitively guided restudying proposed by Dunlosky and Herzog (1998) which claims that learners allocate more study time to information they judge difficult. Second, three personal factors were statistically detectably associated with the relation between people's judgments of learning and their allocations of restudy time: monitoring, achievement, and calibration. These represent two categories of learner characteristics: metacognitive awareness and achievement-related factors. Third, individual differences underlying self-reports about metacognitive control operations are fundamentally different from those underlying on-the-fly metacognitive control. This study reveals the dual-process character of online metacognition, different mechanisms in online metacognition versus self-reported metacognition. It also illuminates some limitations of self-report methodologies in measuring SRL in real time and the importance using state-of-the-art technologies in research on real-time SRL processes.