The effect of delayed-JOLs and sentence generation on children's monitoring accuracy and regulation of idiom study

When studying verbal materials, both adults and children are often poor at accurately monitoring their level of learning and regulating their subsequent restudy of materials, which leads to suboptimal test performance. The present experiment investigated how monitoring accuracy and regulation of study could be improved when learning idiomatic phrases. Elementary school children (fourth and sixth-graders) were instructed to predict their test performance by providing judgments of learning (JOLs). They provided JOLs immediately after studying each idiom, after studying all idioms, or after studying all idioms followed by generating sentences in which the idioms were used. Correlations between JOLs and test performance showed that delayed-JOLs and delayed-JOLs with sentence generation were more accurate than immediate JOLs. JOLs after sentence generation also improved regulation of study compared to delayed-JOLs only. Analyses of JOL reaction times suggest that delayed-JOLs led children to retrieve the literal meaning of the idiom, whereas JOLs after sentence generation led children to focus on connections between studied information, contextual information, and prior knowledge. Sentence generation presents a promising method to improve regulation of study, and thus idiom learning.

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