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that total recall is lower for immediate serial recall tests than for immediate free
recall tests (Bhatarah, Ward, & Tan, 2008; Earhard, 1967; Klein, Addis, & Kahana,
2005; Waugh, 1961). This result demonstrates that, left to their druthers, people
choose an output strategy that increases performance relative to having no control
over output order.
Taken together, the results in this section speak both to the basic effective-
ness of learners' metacognitive control and to implications for improving control.
That is, learners are generally effective at controlling study, but there is room for
improvement.
Improving Metacognitive Control
Improving Monitoring
To improve memory performance, one can focus on metacognitive monitoring or
control. Superior evaluation of what is likely to be difficult and what is likely to be
easy can enable more effective allocation of one's time and resources, even as one's
control policy remains consistent.
One way of increasing the accuracy of metacognitive monitoring is to delay
judgments until some time after study, rather than making them immediately follow-
ing study (Nelson & Dunlosky, 1991), and furthermore to make judgments without
looking at the complete answer, thus encouraging active retrieval of relevant infor-
mation frommemory (Dunlosky &Nelson, 1992). Thiede, Anderson, and Therriault
(2003) extended these results to a more complex task. They found that generating
keywords after reading a text passage led to more accurate self-ratings of text com-
prehension compared to no keyword generation, and this advantage was even greater
when keyword generation was done at a delay. Furthermore, the more accurate mon-
itoring was followed by more strategic choices of which texts to re-study and higher
scores on a final test. Thus, a condition which improved metacognitive monitor-
ing also promoted more effective study choices. Dunlosky, Hertzog, Kennedy, and
Thiede (2005) reviewed other data showing enhanced performance resulting from
improvements in metacognitive monitoring.
Improved metacognitive monitoring may enable more effective implementations
of control processes. But a focus on directly improving metacognitive control may
also be an effective way to improve learning.
Improving Control at Encoding Via Direct Instruction
It is well known that learners can follow instructions (a.k.a. “orienting tasks”) to
encode or retrieve material differently, resulting in changes in performance. For
example, Craik and Lockhart (1972) demonstrated that semantic (“deep”) encoding
of words, such as deciding whether each word would fit into a category or not, led
