Offline-Judgements of Learning (off-JOLs) – in contrast to Judgments of Learning (JOLs) usually assessed after learning – are metacognitive assessments, which are independent of the immediate experience of the current learning situation.
Such an assessment decoupled from the current experience of learning activities should be routed more in theory-based (abstract) conceptions of learning activities, learning materials, and memory. Experiment 1 shows greater accuracy in students’ metacognitive judgements for long-term retention benefits (btw-sbj.: immediate, 1-week, 2-weeks) of testing compared to rereading (within-sbj.) when assessed with off-JOLs rather than JOLs, reflecting actual learning outcomes for testing. Off-JOLs did not show an overestimation of rereading's effectiveness over testing. Thus, JOLs are biased by a negative feedback effect of testing stemming from the experience of the learning situation (e.g., revealing knowledge gaps). Experiment 2 tested whether learners and teachers also showed more accurate metacognitions for other learning activities when removing the experience-bias. In a 2x3x3 mixed design, the present experiment investigated off-JOLs for testing compared to note-taking (within-subjects), whereby students judged the effectivity for themselves and others, whereas teachers only judged the effectivity of the learning activities for others. Additionally, participants were presented with different final test delays. Both teachers and students alike, overestimated the long-term benefits (recall after 1 or 2 weeks) of note-taking as learning tool relative to testing. Learners may know more than we so far thought, but they still err regarding effectivity judgments of other activities (like notetaking) depending on their subjective theories about learning conditions and memory over time.