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spending additional time studying difficult material sometimes results in no ben-
efit for memory of those items (labeled the “labor in vain” effect, cf. Nelson &
Leonesio, 1988). It is not obvious that allowing learners to self-pace can improve
their performance compared to controls who do not self-pace. In a study by Koriat,
Ma'ayan, and Nussinson (2006), learners either self-paced their study of a word
list or spent the same amount of time studying the words but were forced to view
words for uniform amounts of time across items. Self-pacing did not lead to any
significant improvement in performance on a cued recall task. However, using a
recognition task (a more sensitive measure of memory), Tullis and Benjamin (2009)
found that learners who were allowed to allocate their own study time performed
significantly better than did learners forced to spend uniform amounts of time across
items. Interestingly, the improvement in memory performance was found only for
learners who allocated more time to the normatively difficult items at the expense
of the easy items. This result demonstrates that the net effect of self-control over
the pace of study can benefit performance, but only for learners who engage in an
effective allocation strategy.
There is also evidence that the effectiveness of study time allocation increases
with age and expertise. Liu and Fang (2005) found that older grade school students
were more selective about which items they spent more time studying and that free
recall performance correspondingly increased with age. Liu and Fang (2006) found
that older students spent less time on easy items and more time on difficult items
as compared to younger students. Metcalfe (2002) found a difference in the way
novices versus experts allocated study time across English-Spanish word pairs of
varying difficulty. Both groups appear to selectively allocate time to unlearned items
that were closest to being learned. For the experts (self-identified Spanish speakers),
those were the most difficult items; for the novices, those were items that were
somewhat easier.
Devising Study Schedules
Although strategically scheduling one's own study is a common activity, few exper-
iments have investigated how learners do so in laboratory tasks. One important
aspect of scheduling that has received some attention is the temporal distribution
of multiple study trials for the same item. It is well established that spacing out
such trials, rather than massing them together, results in superior memory perfor-
mance at a delay (cf. Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted, & Rohrer, 2006). Son (2004)
investigated learners' tendency to effectively employ spacing. Learners were pre-
sented with synonym word pairs (e.g., “hirsute—hairy”) for 1 s each. After each
presentation, learners made a JOL, then chose whether to re-study the pair immedi-
ately, at a delay, or not at all. Finally, learners were given a cued recall test after
a 15-min delay. Results showed that learners scheduled re-study based on their
metacognitive monitoring, tending to space items they judged as harder and mass
items they judged as easier. Thus, in contrast to findings on self-pacing that support
