The Metamemory Bias Of Middle School Students And It’s Correction

Metamemory monitoring and metamemory control is an important component of the metamemory. As an important form of metamemory monitoring, the judgment of learning refers to foresight judgments of the later recall test scores after studying items. The judgment of learning is of important significance for learners for it is also the measure whether to continue to learn or not. Koriat and Bjork(2005) documented that foresight bias is an important phenomenon in the learning process: The monitoring of one’s own knowledge during study suffers from an inherent discrepancy between study and test situations: Judgments of learning(JOLs) are made in the presence of information that is absent but solicited during testing. Subjects overestmated memory performance for certain strength and directionality of association within the word pair. Furthermore, Koriat and Bjork(2006) found that foresight bias could be alleviated by delaying JOLs after study. The subjects in their studies were all middle school students. So, a second goal of the present study was to investigate the foresight bias of the student’s JOLs, and the influence of the delayed JOLs on the students’ foresight bias.In the present study, 40 middle school students participated in the experiment, and the concrete noun pairs were selected as experimental materials. Experiment 1 explored the foresight bias of immediate JOLs. The materials included 30 associated pairs composed of two equal sets of 10 pairs which were matched in terms of the strength associations and 10 pairs of identical words. In addition, 10 unrelated pairs were included in the list as the filler materials. In experiment 1, subjects were instructed that they would have to study 30 paired associates and would have to indicate their JOLs about each pair as soon as it disappeared from the screen. They were told that in the test phase, they would see each stimulus word in turn and would be asked to recall the corresponding response word. Experiment 2 explored the relationgship between JOLs and allocation of study time.The materials were the same as Experiment 1. In experiment 2, subjects were instructed that they would have to indicate their JOLs about each pair when 30 paired associates were all studied. In experiment 3 explored foresight bias of delayed JOLs and the relationgship between JOLs and allocation of study time.The following conclusions are drawn from the above four experiments.1. When students making immediate JOL, there were foresight biases in the JOLs.JOLs for identical wors pairs were highter than those for high associative pairs and low associative words paits,but later recall of identical pairs was lower than recall of high associative paits.2. A similar pattern of results was obtained, with subjects spending the least amount of time studying identical pairs.3. Foresight bias induces students to overestimate their memory. Delayed JOL can reduce the foresight bias.