MEMORY MONITORING - HOW USEFUL IS SELF-KNOWLEDGE ABOUT MEMORY

The article reports two experiments in which we investigated the value of memory monitoring. Although the act of monitoring may not in itself be a basis for improved memory, it is reasonable to expect that the act of monitoring will provide useful information to the subject. For example, if monitoring identifies items that are inadequately encoded, then the inadequacy can be redressed if the items are repeated. We expected that repeating an item immediately after the subject had evaluated whether the item would succeed or fail later would be more valuable than merely repeating the item without any interpolated monitoring. But it wasn't. Nor did items people expected to forget benefit more from repetition than ones they expected to remember. Because the findings were unexpected, we recast the issues, and discovered that we should not have been surprised. On the whole, we would be better advised to teach subjects effective ways to study than to teach them techniques that accurately identify inadequately encoded items; knowing an item is inadequate is of little value in the absence of skills that will remediate the inadequacy.