Developmental trends in children’s feeling-of-knowing judgements

Abstract

The main goal of this study was to examine developmental trends in the accuracy of feeling-ofknowing (FOK) judgements given that previous work in this issue had yielded inconsistent results. Although most research conducted with preschoolers and young school children has reported increasing accuracy with increasing age, a methodologically improved study (Butterfield, Nelson, & Peck, 1988) did not confirm such a trend. The present study was based on such an improved design but included different age groups (7-, 8-, 9-, and 10-year-olds). A second goal was to explore the basis of FOK judgements, by comparing the traditional “trace-based” view with the “trace accessibility” model developed by Koriat (1993). Whereas the former assumes a two-stage process of monitoring and retrieval, the latter proposes that FOK judgements are based on retrieval attempts and determined by the amount of information that can be spontaneously generated, regardless of its correctness. As a main result, no developmental trends in the accuracy of FOK judgements were found. FOK accuracy was generally low but above chance for all age groups. Furthermore, the findings support the “trace accessibility” model in that dissociations between feeling of knowing and knowing could be demonstrated. That is, although FOK judgements regarding subsequent item recognition were generally high whenever an answer could be generated and much lower when no answer was generated at free retrieval, regardless of its correctness, recognition performance was comparatively low for previous nonretrieved and incorrectly remembered items and close to ceiling for correctly remembered items.