Jacqueline Wong
Making restudy decisions reflects learner’s regulation of learning. In order to successfully comprehend a text, learners have to monitor their current level of comprehension and take steps towards full comprehension if they have yet achieved that. Therefore, if learners are not able to accurately monitor their learning, they end up with poor restudy decisions. Thiede, Redford, Wiley, and Griffin (2017) conducted a study to examine the effect of three types of restudy conditions on learning performances:
- Test-based restudy condition: Presenting learners with the text that they scored the lowest on.
- Judgment-based restudy condition: Presenting learners with the text that they judged to be the least understood.
- Participant’s choice restudy condition: Presenting learners with the text they chose to restudy.
Within the three restudy conditions, half of the learners generated keywords while the other half did not generate any keywords after reading the texts. Result of the study is aligned with findings of previous studies that showed that generating keywords after reading helped learners to become more accurate in judging their level of comprehension.
The learning gains were higher for the test-based restudy condition than the judgment-based restudy condition. This suggest that if learners were to accurately monitor their learning, such as the test-based restudy condition, their reading comprehension scores will significantly improve. The authors argue for the importance of monitoring accuracy for effective self-regulation and urge for more studies to examine ways to enhance learners' ability to accurately monitor their level of comprehension.