John Dunlosky's research while affiliated with Kent State University and other places

Publications (247)

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Making judgments of learning (JOLs) while studying related word pairs can enhance performance on tests that rely on cue-target associations (e.g., cued recall) compared to studying alone. One possible explanation for this positive JOL reactivity effect is that the prompt to make JOLs, which typically occurs halfway through the presentation of each...
Preprint
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Successive relearning (SR) combines retrieval practice across spaced study sessions. In particular, students attempt to recall to-be-learned information (with feedback) during each session until all concepts are correctly recalled and then return to the same material to repeat retrieval practice on multiple spaced practice sessions. Thus, students...
Article
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Mathematical problem solving is a process involving metacognitive (e.g., judging progress), cognitive (e.g., working memory), and affective (e.g., math anxiety) factors. Recent research encourages researchers who study math cognition to consider the role that the interaction between metacognition and math anxiety plays in mathematical problem solvi...
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Making immediate judgments of learning (JOLs) during study can influence later memory performance, with a common outcome being that JOLs improve cued-recall performance for related word pairs (i.e., positive reactivity) and do not impact memory for unrelated pairs (i.e., no reactivity). The cue-strengthening hypothesis proposes that JOL reactivity...
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Unlabelled: Multiple-choice practice tests are beneficial for learning, and students encounter multiple-choice questions regularly. How do students regulate their use of multiple-choice practice testing? And, how effective is students' use of multiple-choice practice testing? In the current experiments, undergraduate participants practiced German-...
Article
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What constrains people’s ability to learn from experience about the effectiveness of practice testing versus restudying for memory (i.e., the testing effect)? Across two cycles, participants studied word pairs, practiced each pair through either restudying or testing, predicted how many pairs they would recall for each strategy, then completed a cr...
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Retrieval practice is beneficial for both easy-to-learn and difficult-to-learn materials, but scant research has examined students’ use of self-testing for items of varying difficulty. In two experiments, we investigated whether students differentially regulate their use of self-testing for easy and difficult items and assessed the effectiveness of...
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How could people enhance the accuracy of judgments for predicting math performance on an upcoming test? Research on category-learning judgments shows that their accuracy is poor for predicting performance for mathematics concepts. Based on cue-utilization theory, interleaved practice (which can enhance performance) and delaying judgments after init...
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Successive relearning involves practicing a task until it is performed correctly and then practicing it again until it is performed correctly during other spaced practice sessions. Despite its widespread use outside of education, few students use this approach to obtain and maintain knowledge in formal educational settings. We review evidence that...
Article
Declarative concepts are abstract concepts denoted by key terms and short definitions that can be applied in a variety of scenarios (e.g., positive reinforcement in psychology; Rawson et al., 2015). One common learning goal for declarative concepts is to instill knowledge that students can use to support the application of content in novel scenario...
Article
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When learners make judgments of learning (JOLs) for some word pairs but not others, how and why is recall performance affected? Participants studied related and unrelated word pairs and made JOLs for a randomly selected half of the pairs. We evaluated two hypotheses. The changed-goal hypothesis states that making JOLs leads learners to notice diffe...
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Metacognition is awareness and control of thinking for learning. Strong metacognitive skills have the power to impact student learning and performance. While metacognition can develop over time with practice, many students struggle to meaningfully engage in metacognitive processes. In an evidence-based teaching guide associated with this paper (htt...
Article
Older adults often demonstrate a monitoring deficit by producing more high-confidence memory errors on recognition memory tests. To eliminate lower memory performance by older adults (OA) as a candidate explanation, we studied how distinctive encoding enhances the retrieval-monitoring accuracy in older adults and younger adults (YA) under different...
Article
Does excellent monitoring of learning support improvements in subsequent relearning? Although some studies answer this question affirmatively, others have suggested that excellent monitoring may not matter. Accordingly, we address the question, when will highly accurate monitoring judgments benefit restudy? According to the contingent-efficacy hypo...
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Prior research has found gender differences in spatial tasks in which men perform better, and are more confident, than women. Do gender differences also occur in people’s confidence as they perform number-line estimation, a common spatial-numeric task predictive of math achievement? To investigate this question, we analyzed outcomes from six studie...
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We investigated whether three interventions – studying incorrect worked examples, studying correct worked examples, or receiving feedback – improved children’s 0–1,000 (Experiment 1) and adults’ 1 thousand–1 billion (Experiment 2) number-line estimation precision relative to a no intervention control group. At pretest, participants estimated number...
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Almost anything worth doing takes effort, so it is no surprise that effort has played such a central role in how researchers, theoreticians, instructors, and even students think about student learning and achievement. In this special issue, the authors of the target articles explore the importance of effort to students’ self-regulated learning with...
Article
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Prior research has found gender differences in spatial tasks in which men perform better, and are more confident, than women. Do gender differences also occur in people’s confidence as they perform number-line estimation, a common spatial-numeric task predictive of math achievement? To investigate this question, we analyzed outcomes from six studie...
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Prior research has investigated whether learners spontaneously adapt their encoding strategies in anticipation of particular test formats (i.e., the encoding-strategy adaptation hypothesis; Finley & Benjamin, 2012). However, the strongest evidence supporting this hypothesis is confounded with test experience (as argued by Cho & Neely, 2017). When l...
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Successive relearning involves practicing to-be-learned content until a designated level of mastery is achieved in each of multiple practice sessions. As compared with practicing the content to the same criterion in a single session, successive relearning has been shown to dramatically boost students’ retention of simple verbal materials. Does the...
Article
Undergraduate students with ADHD may benefit from retrieval practice but may have difficulty using this strategy consistently. We examined whether undergraduates with ADHD benefit as much as non-ADHD students from self-regulated retrieval practice and retrieval practice to criterion. Students with ADHD (n = 58) and without (n = 121) learned key ter...
Article
Successive relearning combines two effective learning techniques (retrieval practice and spaced practice) and involves practicing retrieval until some level of mastery has been reached (i.e., at least one correct retrieval attempt) in each of multiple sessions. Several laboratory studies have demonstrated the promise of successive relearning for en...
Chapter
When people monitor their memory, their judgments of how much they have learned are influenced by the emotional valence of the to-be-learned material. A challenge is to discover why emotion influences people’s monitoring judgments. Toward meeting this challenge, we discuss theory about how emotions may impact memory monitoring (through beliefs or e...
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Background Informal science activities are critical for supporting long-term learning in STEM fields. However, little is known about the kinds of activities children and their families engage in outside of formal settings and how such activities foster long-term STEM engagement. One gap in the literature is the lack of data that document self-desig...
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Objective. In this review, we discuss how to measure the quality of students’ metacognition in classroom and experiential settings. Our purpose is to provide a user’s guide on measuring metacognition in authentic contexts, so that instructors and researchers can explore their students’ metacognition with an aim towards improving their metacognitive...
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Many students use laptops to take notes in classes, but does using them impact later test performance? In a high-profile investigation comparing note-taking writing on paper versus typing on a laptop keyboard, Mueller and Oppenheimer (Psychological Science, 25, 1159–1168, 2014) concluded that taking notes by longhand is superior. We conducted a dir...
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Over the past decades, memory training interventions have been developed in an attempt to stabilize or enhance memory functioning in aging. Only recently has attention been paid to individual differences in training gains and consequently to predictors of such gains. The aim of the present study was to identify which specific cognitive mechanisms/p...
Article
Interleaved practice involves studying exemplars from different categories in a non-systematic, pseudorandom order under the constraint that no two exemplars from the same category are presented consecutively. Interleaved practice of materials has been shown to enhance test performance compared to blocked practice in which exemplars from the same c...
Article
The cue-utilization framework (Koriat, 1997) and the analytic processing theory (Dunlosky, Mueller, & Tauber, 2015) identify people’s beliefs about their memory as central to how judgments of learning (JOLs) are made. This assumption is supported by ample evidence. However, researchers have almost exclusively explored the impact of participants’ be...
Article
https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1Yjm61HucdHyEB Do students understand the potentially detrimental effects of mind wandering as they are watching a lecture online? To answer this question, we combined methods used to assess mind wandering and metacognitive methods used to assess student's judgments of learning. In two studies, college students watch...
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Students rely on their notes to memorise and learn critical course content, and recent studies of note-taking state that most students take notes, citing a survey published in 1974. Over the past four decades, classrooms and note-taking technologies have evolved: students can take notes on electronic devices, and some classes are entirely online. D...
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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Cambridge Core - Cognition - The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
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In The Cambridge Handbook of Cognition and Education - edited by John Dunlosky February 2019
Article
This study investigated the efficacy of the Fluency Development Lesson (FDL) in improving reading achievement in primary grade struggling readers. 30 readers, enrolled in a summer reading clinic, participated in daily 40-min mini-reading lessons across 5 weeks. During the fluency lessons, readers practiced and developed their literacy skills throug...
Article
Older adults produce more high-confidence recognition memory errors in episodic memory tasks. We studied how distinctive encoding enhances the retrieval-monitoring accuracy in older adults (OA) and younger adults (YA). Individuals viewed words consisting of four randomly selected exemplars (e.g., SALMON, BASS, PERCH, SHARK) from a taxonomic categor...
Article
We investigated students' knowledge and beliefs about the impact of using three‐dimensional (3D) multimedia presentations. Students listened to a lecture about the ventricular system, which was presented alone (Experiment 1 only) or with a 3D or a 2D video illustrating the system. Afterwards, students judged how well they would perform on a criteri...
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The amount of information that medical students learn is voluminous and those who do not use evidence‐based learning strategies may struggle. Research from cognitive and educational psychology provides a blueprint on how best to learn science subjects, including clinical anatomy. Students should aim for high‐cognitive learning levels as defined in...
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A common measure of memory monitoring——judgments of learning (JOLs)——has recently been shown to have reactive effects on learning. When participants study a list of related and unrelated word pairs, they recall more related than unrelated pairs. This relatedness effect is larger when people make JOLs than when they do not make them. Evidence is mix...
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Testing is a potent learning tool, but how do students use testing across multiple study sessions? In two studies, we investigated students’ use of testing to learn course materials for a high-stakes exam across four sessions. Of primary interest was (a) whether students used self-testing similarly across sessions and (b) whether students used self...
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Research on techniques for enhancing long-term retention has focused almost exclusively on single-session learning conditions. However, even the most potent initial learning manipulations typically do not yield retention levels sufficient for successful performance in many real-world contexts. In contrast, successive relearning (i.e., practicing to...
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The main goal of the current experiments was to examine the influence of monitoring and reward on elementary school children’s study decisions. First and third graders studied names for 10 animals (e.g., “The elephant’s name is Suzy”) and then were given a cued recall test on which they were shown the animal and needed to recall the name. Next, the...
Article
Acquisition of principle-based concepts involves learning how and when to apply a specific principle to different instances of the same problem type. Within this domain, learning is best achieved when practice involves studying worked examples followed by problem solving. When given the choice to use worked examples versus problem solving, how do p...
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When study is spaced across sessions (versus massed within a single session), final performance is greater after spacing. This spacing effect may have multiple causes, and according to the mediator hypothesis, part of the effect can be explained by the use of mediator-based strategies. This hypothesis proposes that when study is spaced across sessi...
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Although research has established that people can accurately judge how well they have learned categories, no research has examined whether people use their category-learning judgments (CLJs) to regulate their restudy of natural categories. Thus, in five experiments we investigated the relationship between people’s CLJs and selections of categories...
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Objectives: The goal of the present research was to examine the potential of a learner-oriented approach to improving older adults' performance in tasks that are similar to real-life situations that require strategic deployment of cognitive resources. A crucial element of this approach involves encouraging older adults to explicitly analyze tasks...
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Students often are overconfident when they predict their performance on classroom examinations, and their accuracy often does not improve across exams. One contributor to overconfidence may be that students did not have enough experience, and another is that students may under-use their knowledge of prior exam performance to predict performance on...
Article
According to analytic-processing theory, when people are asked to judge their future memory performance, they search for cues that will help them reduce their uncertainty for how well they will remember each item. For instance, many people believe that more fluently performing a task is related to better task performance. Thus, when studying items...
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Context: Being able to accurately monitor learning activities is a key element in self-regulated learning in all settings, including medical schools. Yet students' ability to monitor their progress is often limited, leading to inefficient use of study time. Interventions that improve the accuracy of students' monitoring can optimise self-regulated...
Article
Even though retrieval practice typically has a robust, positive influence on memory, response format (overt vs. covert retrieval) may moderate its effect when students learn complex material. Overt retrieval is likely to promote exhaustive retrieval, whereas covert retrieval may not be exhaustive for familiar key terms. In two experiments, students...
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This study set out to examine two important aspects of the use of eWriters by early elementary students. First, it explored the impact of eWriters on literacy motivation and self-efficacy of students in Pre-Kindergarten, Kindergarten, and First grade. Second, it explored if and how the technology implementation would affect parent and teacher relat...
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A category learning judgment (CLJ) involves judging one’s learning or performance for a given topic or category. The present study was the first to investigate CLJs in a classroom, where students’ judgments of how well they have learned topics may be particularly relevant for guiding their study decisions. In an undergraduate statistics class, stud...
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Students are commonly asked to learn declarative concepts in many courses. One strategy students report using involves generating concrete examples of abstract concepts. If students have difficulties evaluating the quality of their generated examples, then instructors will need to provide students with appropriate scaffolds or feedback to improve j...
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When correcting a common misconception, it seems likely that for corrective feedback to be effective, it needs to be believed. In 2 experiments, we assessed how participants’ belief in the validity of corrective feedback regarding individual misconceptions influenced knowledge revision. After responding about the validity of a set of misconceptions...
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Age-related differences in memory monitoring appear when people learn emotional words. Namely, younger adults' judgments of learning (JOLs) are higher for positive than neutral words, whereas older adults' JOLs do not discriminate between positive versus neutral words. In two experiments, we evaluated whether this age-related difference extends to...