Can Good Learners Judge How Well They Learned?

Key points

Your ability to think about your own thinking is called metacognition.

One form of metacognition is your ability to judge whether you learned something after studying it.

These judgments of learning are helpful for allocating study time.

Research suggests that good learners have inaccuracies in their judgments that enhance learning.

Learning new information is a lifelong process. Certainly, you do a lot of it when you’re a student, but your daily life requires you to pick up new knowledge and skills. You find out about new products, get new responsibilities at work, or develop a new hobby that involves a whole domain of additional facts and abilities.

To learn new things, you have to decide what information to focus on to help you remember it later. Ideally, you would devo