Do Judgments of Learning Directly Enhance Learning of Educational Materials?
Ariel, Robert; Karpicke, Jeffrey D.; Witherby, Amber E.; Tauber, Sarah K. (2021). Educational Psychology Review, v33 n2 p693-712. Retrieved from: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1295971
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examining514Students, gradePS
Single Study Review
Review Details
Reviewed: January 2023
- Single Study Review (findings for Judgements of learning - Ariel et al. (2021))
- Randomized Controlled Trial
- Meets WWC standards without reservations because it is a randomized controlled trial with low attrition.
This review may not reflect the full body of research evidence for this intervention.
Evidence Tier rating based solely on this study. This intervention may achieve a higher tier when combined with the full body of evidence.
Findings
|
Outcome measure |
Comparison | Period | Sample |
Intervention mean |
Comparison mean |
Significant? |
Improvement index |
Evidence tier |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Researcher-developed reading comprehension test |
Judgements of learning - Ariel et al. (2021) vs. Business as usual |
0 Days |
Full sample: Aggregate and term-specific Judgments of Learning;
|
49.29 |
47.34 |
No |
-- | ||
| Show Supplemental Findings | |||||||||
|
Researcher-developed reading comprehension test |
Judgements of learning - Ariel et al. (2021) vs. Business as usual |
0 Days |
Experiment 4: Term-specific Judgments of Learning;
|
47.41 |
41.00 |
No |
-- | ||
|
Researcher-developed reading comprehension test |
Judgements of learning - Ariel et al. (2021) vs. Business as usual |
0 Days |
Experiment 2a: Term-specific Judgments of Learning;
|
49.29 |
44.44 |
No |
-- | ||
|
Researcher-developed reading comprehension test |
Judgements of learning - Ariel et al. (2021) vs. Business as usual |
0 Days |
Experiment 1: Aggregate Judgments of Learning;
|
48.27 |
45.87 |
No |
-- | ||
|
Researcher-developed reading comprehension test |
Judgements of learning - Ariel et al. (2021) vs. Business as usual |
0 Days |
Experiment 3: Term-specific Judgments of Learning;
|
40.31 |
42.37 |
No |
-- | ||
|
Researcher-developed reading comprehension test |
Judgements of learning - Ariel et al. (2021) vs. Business as usual |
0 Days |
Experiment 2b: Term-specific Judgments of Learning;
|
63.13 |
65.36 |
No |
-- | ||
Evidence Tier rating based solely on this study. This intervention may achieve a higher tier when combined with the full body of evidence.
Sample Characteristics
Characteristics of study sample as reported by study author.
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Female: 45%
Male: 55%
Study Details
Setting
The study took place using an online task accessed through Amazon Mechanical Turk (mturk.com).
Study sample
A total of 514 participants in the United States were recruited online on the Amazon Mechanical Turk website to participate in the study. Participants were paid a small amount (about $1.00 to $1.50) to complete the task required for the study. All participants were high school graduates and 45 percent were female. The authors do not provide further information on the study participants.
Intervention Group
Judgements of Learning (JOLs) ask learners to rate their confidence in their ability to later recall or answer questions about recently studied material. In this study, participants read an educational text and were instructed to make aggregate or term-specific JOLs immediately after reading the text. Aggregate JOLs involved asking participants to rate their confidence in understanding the text as a whole, while term-specific JOLs involved asking participants how confident they were in their understanding by prompting about specific content in the passage. For example, considering an educational passage about how minerals are made, an aggregate JOL might be “How confident are you that you understand the information in the passage?”, while a term-specific JOL might be “How confident are you that you understand how minerals are made?” Each task lasted 10 to 15 minutes.
Comparison Group
Participants in the comparison group read the educational text but did not receive a JOL prompt after reading the text.
Support for implementation
The intervention was implemented by researchers online and hosted as a Human Intelligence Task on Amazon Mechanical Turk. A Human Intelligence task is one where individuals are paid a small amount of money to complete a discrete task. In this case, the task was to read the educational passage and respond to a short quiz about the content. The study does not describe any additional support for implementation.
An indicator of the effect of the intervention, the improvement index can be interpreted as the expected change in percentile rank for an average comparison group student if that student had received the intervention.
For more, please see the WWC Glossary entry for improvement index.
An outcome is the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that are attained as a result of an activity. An outcome measures is an instrument, device, or method that provides data on the outcome.
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The sample on which the analysis was conducted.
The group to which the intervention group is compared, which may include a different intervention, business as usual, or no services.
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The mean score of students in the comparison group.
The WWC considers a finding to be statistically significant if the likelihood that the finding is due to chance alone, rather than a real difference, is less than five percent.
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Study findings for this report.
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and the regulations for ED discretionary grants (EDGAR Part 77).