The effects of goal-driven and data-driven regulation on metacognitive monitoring during learning: A developmental perspective

Research in metacognition (Koriat, Ma'ayan, & Nussinson, 2006) suggests bidirectional links between monitoring and control during learning: When self-regulation is goal-driven, monitoring affects control so that increased study time (ST) enhances judgments of learning (JOLs). However, when self-regulation is data-driven, JOLs are based on the feedback from control, and therefore JOLs decrease with ST under the heuristic that ease of encoding is diagnostic of successful recall. Evidence for both types of relationships occurring within the same situation was found for adults. We examined the development of the ability to respond differentially to data-driven and goal-driven variation in ST within the same task. Children in Grades 5 and 6 exhibited a positive ST-JOL relationship for goal-driven regulation and a negative relationship for data-driven regulation but never in the same task. In contrast, the JOLs and recall of 9th graders and college students yielded differential cosensitivity to data-driven and goal-driven variation. The 5th and 6th graders also evidenced an adult-like pattern of JOLs and recall under a partitioning procedure that helped them in factoring the variation in ST due to data-driven and goal-driven variation in ST. The results are discussed in terms of the metacognitive sophistication needed for considering both types of variation simultaneously in making metacognitive judgments.