Immediate judgments of learning do not improve performance for educationally relevant materials: Evidence from key-term definitions, country outlines, and animal species

Recent research shows that asking learners to make immediate judgments of learning (JOLs) during learning can improve their later memory performance for word pairs, words, and images. Whereas this so-called positive JOL reactivity effect has sparked much discussion on its educational relevance, empirical tests of the generalizability of immediate JOL reactivity to educationally relevant materials remain rare. The experiments reported in this study examined whether making immediate JOLs improves test performance across three exemplary types of educationally relevant materials. In three experiments, participants studied key-term definitions (Experiment 1), pairs of country outlines and country names (Experiment 2), or pairs of animal images and species names (Experiment 3), made immediate JOLs during studying or did not make JOLs, and were tested on their memory in short-answer tests (Experiments 1 to 3) or multiple-choice tests (Experiment 1). Results revealed that making immediate JOLs did not improve test performance. On the contrary, Experiment 2 and an integrative data analysis indicated that making JOLs reduced test performance when difficulty was high. These results provide no evidence that beneficial effects of immediate JOLs generalize to the learning of educationally relevant materials, highlighting the need for further research to understand why positive JOL reactivity does not emerge in this context.