Children’s Short-Term Versus Long-Term Study Strategies

ABSTRACT. First graders were tested on 2 tasks investigating metacognitive control abil-ities. In Experiment 1, after studying and making judgments of learning (JOLs) on word–synonym pairs, they could either mass or space each pair’s restudy trials. If they chose to mass study, then the pair was presented again immediately. If they chose to space study, then the pair was presented again after a delay, testing a long-term control strategy. Results showed that children’s JOLs did not influence study strategy. Furthermore, in gen-eral, children chose to mass more often than to space. In Experiment 2, after studying and making JOLs on word–synonym pairs, they could either read the entire pair again or they could generate the target by attempting to retrieve the target synonym when shown only the word. Unlike Experiment 1, both read and generate decisions were carried out in the short term. Also unlike Experiment 1, Experiment 2’s results showed that the higher the child’s JOL, the more likely they chose generation strategies—showing evidence for short-term metacognitively controlled strategies. Key words: children’s metacognitive control, judgments of learning, metacognitive con-trol, short-term and long-term control IT IS EASY TO UNDERSTAND why the optimization of long-term learning is a critical issue in the field of cognitive psychology. As educators, teachers strive for their students not merely to learn and store information for the short term, but to constantly remember and build on that knowledge far into the future. As learn-ers in school, students also study with the aim to recall the studied information