Developmental trends in children's memory monitoring

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to explore young children's memory monitoring abilities on a judgment-of-learning (JOL) task. Recent research on adults' JOLs has shown that predictions about subsequent recall for items that have been recently studied have never been very accurate immediately after learning but have been very accurate when judgments were delayed. One of the major goals of the present studies was to investigate whether the delayed-JOL effect could be observed in children of different ages. A secondary goal of the study was to compare individual-item JOLs with aggregate JOLs based on all items of a given list. If young children possess basic monitoring skills, both their delayed JOLs and their aggregate judgments should be comparably realistic. Our two experiments confirmed this assumption for all age groups involved (kindergartners, second and fourth graders). That is, JOLs were much more accurate when given after a delay of about 2 min than immediately after study, and overconfidence was typically larger for item-by-item JOLs than for aggregate-item JOLs. In fact, the pattern of findings for the older school children was very similar to that found for adults. Overall, these findings support the position that developmental trends in children's procedural metamemory are not due to differences in basic monitoring skills but attributable to developmental changes concerning the interplay between monitoring and self-regulation activities.