Differences in judgments of learning difficulty.
Academically successful and less successful fifth graders were asked to make judgments about the ease of understanding and remembering various sentences and were given the opportunity to attempt to remember some of them before being asked to judge new sets of sentences. The results of the first experiment indicate that, at the beginning of the experiment, the successful students were much more likely than their less successful peers to realize that sentences expressing arbitrary relationships were more difficult to remember. These differences became even greater after students were given the opportunity to attempt to remember some of the sentences they had judged initially. The memory performance of the successful students also improved as they became more familiar with the experimental task, but the performance of the less successful students did not. The results of the second experiment showed that less successful students who had received appropriate training were able to use information about the arbitrariness of relationships as the basis for their judgments of learning difficulty. The training also facilitated their ability to remember. Implications of these findings are discussed.
D002648:Child; D003210:Concept Formation; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D007859:Learning Disabilities / Q000523:psychology*; D011939:Mental Recall; D012718:Set, Psychology