Research has observed that monitoring one's own learning modifies memory for some materials but not for others. Specifically, making judgments of learning (JOLs) while learning word pairs improves subsequent cued-recall memory performance for related word pairs but not for unrelated word pairs. Theories that have attempted to explain this pattern…

What do learners do when they control whether to engage in massed or spaced practice? According to theories by Son (2004) and by Metcalfe and Kornell (2005), the tendency for learners to choose spaced practice over massed practice should decline as item difficulty becomes greater. Support originally was obtained when pairs containing unfamiliar…

Gestalt psychologists proposed two distinct learning mechanisms. Associative learning occurs gradually through the repeated co-occurrence of external stimuli or memories. Insight learning occurs suddenly when people discover new relationships within their prior knowledge as a result of reasoning or problem solving processes that re-organize or…

Formulaic language is widely recognized to be of central importance to fluent and idiomatic language use. However, the mechanics of how formulaic language is acquired are not well understood. Some researchers (e.g. Nick Ellis) believe that the chunking inherent in formulaic language drives the language learning process. Others (e.g. Wray) claim…

Second-grade children were given general training in monitoring the utility of strategies, the affective consequences of strategy use, or no strategy-monitoring training. They then performed an associative learning task, first without strategy instructions and then with instructions to use either an effective or ineffective strategy. All training…

This paper summarizes our present knowledge and understanding of the processes and outcomes of learning. The basic idea about learning is that the outcomes of learning (e.g., propositional knowledge, procedural skills, and mental models) reflect differences in learning processes (e.g., encoding skills, attention allocation, and hypothesis…