The Effects of Encoding Fluency and Retrieval Fluency on Children's with-Learning Disabilities Judgements of Learning

Abstract

There is much controversy on the psychological mechanism of Judgements of learning (JOLs). Cue-utilization approach proposed by Koriat considers that most of the cues can be grouped into three classes: intrinsic, extrinsic, and mnemonic. Both intrinsic and extrinsic cues may affect JOLs directly, and they may also exert their effect indirectly through their influence on any of the internal, mnemonic cues. The theory can explain successfully the bases or implications of JOLs from a broad perspective, but it can not state the way how individuals make JOLs. Meanwhile, some researchers proposed encoding fluency and retrieval fluency to explain and examine their effects on JOLs during leaning process, which are helpful for researchers to probe into the psychological mechanism of JOLs deeply. In addition, some research focused on children with learning disabilities (LD) found that, compared to their normal peers, lower metacognitive accuracy was one of their important characteristics. However, most of research was descriptive, and can not provide suitable targeted direction for educational practices. According to these, the present study would examine the different effects of different fluency cues on children with LD to find their specific influencial patterns. Twenty children with LD and twenty normal children selected from a common primary school (Mean age = 10.5 years) participated in the experiment to make item-by-item JOLs for paired words presented using a PC. This study examined the effects of encoding fluency (inferred from self-paced study time) and retrieval fluency (inferred from the latency of pre-JOL retrieval) on JOLs, wihch were elicited either immediately after study or after a short or longer delay. Results showed that: (1) Children with LD mainly utilized retrieval fluency to make JOL across immediate and delay conditions. However, for normal children, it showed some distinction between encoding and retrieval fluency as potential cues for JOL across immediate and delay conditions. (2)As a kind of JOLs cues, encoding fluency was more valid than retrieval fluency with immediate JOLs condition, whereas retrieval fluency validity increased with JOLs delay. Based on the above all results, normal children's JOLs are based on the flexible and adaptive utilization of different mnemonic cues according to their relative validity in predicting their final recall, whereas the cues children's with LD JOLs based on are not comparably flexible.