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Metamemory, John Dunlosky, Keith W. Thiede

Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundational Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Metamemory refers to people’s beliefs about their memory and to how people monitor and control their learning and retrieval. In this chapter, we describe monitoring and control processes involved in learning and retrieval, how these processes have been measured, and key outcomes relevant to human metamemory. Based on these outcomes, general conclusions include the following: (a) people’s judgments of their memory are based on a variety of cues; hence (b) judgment accuracy arises from the diagnosticity of the cues, so that above-chance accuracy of any metamemory judgment only arises when the available cues are predictive (or diagnostic) of criterion performance; …