The Allocation Of Study Time In The Tradeoff Decision-Making Situation:a Dynamic Process

Allocation of study time is refers to the planed behavior that learners allocate time resource to different learning tasks, reflects the individual’s level of adjusting and controlling their psychological resources in the process of learning(Perfect & Schwartz,2002).The in-depth research of study time allocation’s internal mechanism can provide a scientific theoretical guidance for self-regulated learning, teaching and education.The study focused on the dynamic process of allocation of study time, and discussed the internal mechanism of the construction of agendas by investigating the changing process of learners’ trade-off decision-making.On the basis of Metcalfe’s paradigm, the study built a learning situation for learners’weighing. Tow experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of item value, and the mutual effect of item value and item difficulty on item selection and self-pacing study time in different learning stages in a certain time respectively.The independent variables were item value, item difficulty and learning stage, and the dependent variables were item selection number, self-pacing study time and recall performance.The study included two experiments. Experiment 1 examined the effect of item value on study time allocation in different learning stages. In view of the important influence of item difficulty on study time allocation, item difficulty is added in Experiment 2, aimed to examine the impact of item’s difficulty and value on allocation of study time. Results revealed that there was a significant two-way interaction between learning stage and item value.The participants tended to study the high-value items at the beginning, then to study the medium-value ones, and they preferred to select more high-value items to review in the final stages of learning. There was a significant two-way interaction between learning stage and item difficulty. Participants tended to study the items from easy to difficult. The experiment also found that there was a significant three-way interaction between learning stage, item value and item difficulty. Participants preferred to learn high value items in every learning stage, but focused on different difficulty items in each of the stage.This study mainly reached the following conclusions:1.Allocation of study time is a dynamic process, and the learning process can affect individual’s study time allocation on items with different difficulty and value.2.There have a trade-off process between multiple factors in the allocation of study time in the complex learning situations.3,Trade-off decision-making is a dynamic process, and the learners can balance between the item’s value and difficulty according to the changing factors as study time goes on.