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Postman (1964) found that learning improved across a series of unrelated word
lists as learners acclimated to the task, a phenomenon he dubbed “learning to learn.”
It is also clear from studies of intentional versus incidental learning that knowledge
at all of an upcoming test can change the way learners encode information, though
specific knowledge about the test format may do so more potently (McDaniel,
Blischak, & Challis, 1994). What changes in metacognitive control of study may
give rise to such effects?
Learners have been shown to adjust their amount of study after experience with
the nature of the material and the demands of the test. For example, d'Ydewalle,
Swerts, and De Corte (1983, Experiment 2) had learners study a passage of text
for as long as they wanted, followed by either a fill-in-the-blank test or a multiple
choice test. Learners were led to expect that they would receive the same test format
for a second study-test cycle (using a new text passage of the same length). Learners
spent more time studying the passage in the second cycle than they had during the
first cycle. Furthermore, they spent more time if they expected a fill-in-the-blank
test versus a multiple choice test. These changes in study duration were appropriate
considering that performance on the first test was rarely perfect and that the fill-in-
the-blank test was more difficult than the multiple choice test.
Finley and Benjamin (2009) evaluated learners' abilities to adaptively modify
their encoding strategies to better reflect the demands of upcoming tests as they
gained more experience with the tests. Across four study-test cycles, learners were
induced to expect either cued or free recall tests by studying lists of word pairs and
receiving the same test format for each list. Tests required recall of the target (right-
hand) words either in the presence (cued recall) or in the absence (free recall) of
the cue (left-hand) words. A fifth and final cycle included either the expected or the
alternate, unexpected test format. On both cued and free recall final tests, learners
who had expected that format outperformed those who had not expected it, as shown
in Fig. 6.1. Furthermore, on subsequent tests of recognition, cued-expecting learn-
ers showed superior recognition of cue words and superior associative recognition
of intact word pairs, with such recognition decreasing across lists for free-expecting
learners. These results demonstrate that learners were not merely modulating study
effort
based on anticipated test difficulty but were adopting qualitatively differ-
ent encoding strategies that were appropriate to the demands of the expected test.
Specifically, free-expecting learners learned to attend predominantly to the tar-
get words, abandoning the cue-target associative strategy with which they had
begun.
In another experiment, Finley and Benjamin (2009) investigated adaptive
changes in control of self-paced study. Learners were allowed to control study time
across three cued recall and three free recall study-test cycles. They were instructed
as to the nature of each upcoming test before they began the study. Importantly,
each cycle included word pairs of both high and low associative strength, a variable
that affected performance for cued recall (higher recall for high associative strength
pairs) but not free recall. Learners began the task by allocating more study time to
pairs with low associative strength when expecting either test format. As shown in
Fig. 6.2, learners continued this pattern of allocation across cued-recall study-test
