A Metacognitive Retrieval Practice Intervention to Improve Undergraduates' Monitoring and Control Processes and Use of Performance Feedback for Classroom Learning

The present study examined the effects of a classroom intervention on students' metacognitive monitoring of retrieval practice performance feedback and metacognitive control of future study decisions. A true experimental design was used to randomly assign 103 undergraduate students from an education course to trained (n = 49) and control (n = 54) conditions. The primary goals of this work were to examine whether training metacognitive monitoring and control skills for retrieval practice increases students' academic performance, their independent use of practice-testing, and the accuracy of the metacognitive monitoring judgments they make based on external feedback. During the semester, students completed a pre- and postmetacognitive awareness inventory (MAI), 10 practice-tests, 10 feedback monitoring assignments, and a cumulative final examination. The feedback assignments required students to identify areas of mastery (i.e., well-learned topics) and areas of weakness (i.e., yet-to-be-learned topics). In addition, students were asked to monitor the effectiveness of their current strategies (i.e., monitoring strategy use) and to select a study strategy for their examination preparation (i.e., control strategy decisions). Students who completed the metacognitive retrieval practice training scored higher on final exam items that were not previously quizzed, compared with the control group. In an overall mediation model, when all of the relations among metacognitive, control, and outcome variables were examined simultaneously, yet-to-be-learned monitoring accuracy had the strongest indirect effect of training on final examination performance for nonquizzed items. These findings suggest that monitoring feedback accurately from practice-tests is important and can be improved with training.