SELF-MONITORING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING

The Self-Monitoring Approach For Effective Learning

John Dunlosky
Kent State

Christopher Hertzog
Georgia Institute of Technology

Mary R. T. Kennedy
University of Minnesota

Keith W. Thiede
University of Illinois at Chicago.

People often seek techniques that can enhance their learning and retention of important materials. Whereas popular techniques focus on how to increase the effectiveness of memorization by using mnemonics, the self-monitoring approach attempts to enhance peoples learning vis--vis the use of accurate monitoring to regulate study. As such, this approach may complement existing mnemonic techniques by helping students to identify which materials have not been well learned and hence require further study. The promise of this self-monitoring approach is illustrated by evidence from three independent lines of research, which demonstrate that the use of accurate monitoring can improve learning for individuals with varying abilities and across different kinds of material.

Individuals who are concerned about their failing memory, those who need to learn new information for their jobs (e.g., technical procedures or clients names), and students of all kinds often search for ways to exceed the limits of ordinary memory by using mental mnemonics. The power of these mnemonics typically resides in changing the way individuals attempt to learn new materials. For instance, many popular and effective mnemonicse.g., the Method of Loci and the pegword mnemonicencourage learners to form vivid images of to-be-learned materials while they try to memorize them. Researchers and lay people alike have been preoccupied with these mnemonic techniques, as is partly evident by the large number of self-help books and internet-based sites available that extol the virtues of the mnemonics and train their use. Modern scientific research has continued to evaluate the efficacy of classical mnemonics and attempted to improve them, with growing interest in aiding individuals with memory deficits (e.g., Ball et al., 2002; Hill, Bckman, & Stigsdotter Neely, 2000). In the present article, we describe a complementary technique for enhancing the effectiveness of learning, which we call the self-monitoring approach. Instead of prescribing how materials themselves should be studied (as with mnemonic training), the self-monitoring approach involves having learners monitor which materials have versus have not been well learned. Monitoring here means evaluating internal states, such as assessing memory of newly studied materials, and is often measured by having an individual judge those states, such as by predicting how well they will perform on an upcoming test. Although the idea that selfmonitoring can be used to enhance learning is not new
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(Woodworth, 1921), many students (if not most of them) do not regularly capitalize on the potential benefits of self-monitoring, and the majority of selfhelp books on memory currently give short shrift to this potentially effective technique. One possible cause of this neglect is that the efficacy of self-monitoring for effective learning has not been systematically investigated. In part to promote investigation in this area, we first discuss principles that underlie the self-monitoring approach and then describe recent research from three laboratories that demonstrate its promise. This particular research, which was independently conducted in the past 5 years, is reviewed for three reasons. First, in contrast to the volumes of research that demonstrate the efficacy of mental mnemonics, the potential of selfmonitoring to improve learning has only recently come under experimental scrutiny. Second, and most critical, the research described here provides critical tests of some assumptions of the self-monitoring approach itself. And finally, this research also illustrates the breadth of this approach by demonstrating its efficacy for different populations of learners (college students, older adults, and adults with acquired brain injury) and for learning different kinds of material (paired associates and text). The Self-Monitoring Approach: Principles and Conditions for Success The self-monitoring approach can be understood within the context of models of self-regulated learning. These models specify how monitoring is used to regulate learning (e.g., Nelson & Narens, 1990; Son & Metcalfe, 2000; Thiede & Dunlosky, 1999; Winne & Hadwin, 1998). Some of the principles behind these

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SELF-MONITORING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING models are shown in Figure 1 (adapted from Nelson & Narens, 1990), which also distinguishes between the application of mnemonics that are commonly taught during memory training and the self-monitoring of learning. The figure does not provide a detailed theoretical account of self-regulated learning but instead is meant to place the self-monitoring approach within a broader context involving other relevant strategic behaviors. tor how well she had learned it. Such self-monitoring is distinct from the application of mnemonics and involves inferring how well an item has been learned (for relevant theory of memory monitoring, see Koriat, 1997). As illustrated in the lower box of Figure 1, selfmonitoring of learningwhich is represented by the arrow from Study of Current Itemis central to evaluating the progress one is making toward meeting a learning goal (i.e., Have I met my learning goal?). This evaluation can be used to control further learning, such as by deciding to continue studying the current item (as depicted in Figure 1) or by selecting the item for a future study trial (e.g., Son, 2004). Of course, whether an individual uses monitoring at all to control learning is one condition of success for a selfmonitoring approach for effective learning. That is, people may fail to evaluate whether a goal has been met, or they may fail to use such Method of loci an evaluation to decide whether to Keyword mnemonic continue studying an item. If these Interactive imagery Organization kind of metacognitive failures Name-face mnemonic occur, then a memoryGrouping improvement program based on the self-monitoring approach would not fare well. Importantly, people apparently do use monitoring to control learning in a relatively effective manner. In particular, most models predict that learners will allocate more study to items judged to be less well learned than those judged as better learned, which is represented by Continue Studying in Figure 1. Individuals of all ages typically do use monitoring to control learning in this manner. Also, Metcalfe (2002) has recently presented evidence that a learner will devote more time initially to items within his or her region of proximal learning. Materials within this region are just beyond the grasp of the learner that is most amenable to learning (p. 350, Metcalfe, 2002). Learners first study materials within this region instead of focusing on those that have already been well learned or on those that are too difficult to learn. Accordingly, learners may not always select the most difficult items for study (i.e., they may elect to not study them, see Shall I Study Current Item? in Figure 1), but instead they may shift to studying easier materials that are more amenable to learning given the current task (for relevant evidence, see Metcalfe, 2002; Son & Metcalfe, 2000; Thiede & Dunlosky, 1999). Most important, a common thesis of these models is that learners will often attempt to use monitoring to control learning in a relatively effective manner. Another condition for success is that the learning environment must be structured so that learners have the opportunity to use monitoring to control learning. Although it sounds like a truism, this condition is
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Shall I Study Current Item?

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Figure 1. Conceptual framework of self-regulated learning, which distinguishes between control processes (e.g., applying mnemonics and restudying) and self-monitoring of learning.

To help explain some of the principles embodied by Figure 1, imagine a student studying Foreign-language vocabulary for an upcoming test. Assuming the student decided to select a given item for study, she may continue by studying the item using any one of a number of mnemonics (e.g., keyword method or grouping) to associate the two words of a pair. Applying effective mnemonics is an important process that pertains specifically to controlling how a particular item is processed during study (Nelson & Narens, 1990). Sometime after studying a given item, the student may moni-

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SELF-MONITORING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING worth mentioning because many circumstances arise that do not afford the use of monitoring to control learning. For instance, experimenter-paced tasks used to measure basic abilities may unwittingly undermine participants control by preventing the selective restudy of items. Likewise, students may rob themselves of the opportunity to use selective restudy strategies if they wait until the last moment to cram for an exam, which is a surprisingly common activity (Taraban, Rynearson, & Stalcup, 2001). In both cases, the benefits of self-monitoring is expected to be minimal. The final condition needed for the successful use of self-monitoring is that individuals must be relatively accurate when monitoring the degree of learning achieved prior to restudy (for relevant theories of monitoring accuracy, see Koriat, 1997; Scheck, Meeter, & Nelson, 2004; Weaver & Kelemen, 2003). To understand why, consider two students who are studying for an upcoming exam. After reading a chapter in a textbook, both monitor how well they understood each paragraph by simply judging their learning. For each paragraph, the students ask, Will I remember the central ideas in this paragraph on the upcoming exam? In Figure 1, this question is analogous to Have I Met My Learning Goal? Accuracy of monitoring is the degree to which each students judgments predict (or correlate with) actual retention of the information in those paragraphs. For the present example, assume that one students judgments are perfectly accurate in that her judgments would perfectly predict performance on an upcoming exam with no further study, whereas the other students judgments are not accurate at all. Because the former students monitoring judgments provide a highly accurate assessment of what she had versus had not learned, she will be able to isolate the less well learned paragraphs for continued study. By contrast, the latter student will likely regulate study less effectively because he will not be able to focus restudy on just those paragraphs that can benefit from it. Instead, he may spend too much time restudying all the material, or even worse, fail to restudy paragraphs that he believed had been well learned but that actually had not been. The idea is simply that without accurate monitoring, learners will not be able to validly assess whether their learning goals have been met, which in turn would lead to ineffective control of restudy (Thiede, 1999). In summary, self-monitoring may complement the application of mnemonics to yield superior learning. A main point of Figure 1 is not that accurate selfmonitoring should supplant the use of effective mnemonics, but instead that self-monitoring can be used in conjunction with them. In particular, applying an effective mnemonic often increases the likelihood of retention, but some items may still not be retained after an
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initial study attempt. Accurate self-monitoring of learning can allow an individual to identify those items that are unlikely to be retained, and by doing so, an individual can further control learning of them by reapplying the same mnemonics or by choosing other ones. As argued above, however, such self-monitoring will fail when learners are unable to use monitoring to control learning or when the accuracy of the monitoring is poor. Unfortunately, students monitoring is often quite poor and sometimes even misleading (e.g., Benjamin, Bjork, & Schwartz, 1998). For instance, when students judge how well they have learned recently studied texts materials (as in the example above), the accuracy of their judgments at predicting performance is quite poor (for reviews, see Lin & Zabrucky, 1998; Maki, 1998). Fortunately, techniques have been discovered that can improve learners monitoring accuracy, and hence can be used to establish the viability of the selfmonitoring approach. In the next section, we describe two of these techniques (one for text materials and the other for paired associates). As important, evidence is presented that illustrates how using these techniques can enhance the effectiveness of learning as predicted by the self-monitoring approach. Although the three studies described below have been published, some of the results we discuss here were not previously emphasized or even presented because they were not pertinent to the specific aims of the original articles. Accordingly, to help aid in the interpretation of the relevant results, we provide an overview of the method used in each study and inferential statistics for all descriptive results that have not been previously reported. Study 1: College Students and Learning Text Materials Thiede, Anderson, and Therriault (2003) explored the degree to which a new techniquewhich involves generating keywords from textboosts the accuracy of peoples judgments about how well they understood recently studied text material. By using multiple study trials of the same text materials, their method also allowed them to evaluate whether improving accuracy also enhanced learning as predicted by the selfmonitoring approach. Method Overview Thiede et al. (2003) had college students learn six texts taken from encyclopedias. The texts were on different topics (e.g., Norse settlements, naval warfare), and each one was about 1300 words in length. During an initial study phase, participants read each text in a self-paced manner and made a monitoring judgment for each one. For the immediate keyword group (n = 22), immediately after reading a given text, they were shown the title and were instructed to write five key words that would capture the essence of the text. For the delayed keyword group (n = 22), they first read all

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SELF-MONITORING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING six texts, and then they were shown each title individually and were asked to generate five keywords for each text. Examples of key words were provided for a noncritical text, but no formal instruction on how to generate key words was provided. For both groups, after generating keywords for a given text, a participant then made a monitoring judgment. For this judgment, they were presented with the title of the text and this question: How well do you think you understood the passage whose title is above? 1 (very poorly) to 7 (very well). After reading and judging all the texts, they then answered six questions for each one; performance on this initial test was used to estimate monitoring accuracy. Participants then had the opportunity to control learning by selecting texts for restudy. They were shown the titles from all six texts simultaneously on a computer screen. From this screen, they chose texts for restudy. After they chose a particular text for restudy, its title was eliminated from the list. Participants could restudy as few or as many of the texts as they desired. They then studied each of the selected texts individually. After this restudy phase, they answered six new questions about each text, so that gains after restudy could be assessed. Results Several outcomes were relevant to the potential efficacy of the self-monitoring approach. First consider monitoring accuracy, which was measured by correlating judgments with test performance during the initial phase of the experiment. Monitoring accuracy was greater when keywords were generated after a delay (M correlation between judgments and initial test performance = .70) than immediately after reading (M = .29). Given these differences in monitoring accuracy, greater gains in learning were expected from the delayed than immediate keyword group. Performance on the initial test (i.e., prior to restudy) was statistically equivalent for the two groups. As expected, gains in learning from the initial test to the final test after restudy were greater for the delayed than immediate group. In fact, the immediate keyword group showed no reliable gain after restudy, whereas the delayed keyword group showed considerable gain. According to the current approach, accurate monitoring benefited learning because participants in the delayed keyword group were more likely to select texts that could benefit from restudy. Importantly, this account was confirmed by more fine-grained analyses of test performance. First consider performance on the initial test (i.e., prior to restudy) for texts that were versus were not selected for restudy. For participants in the immediate group (who showed poor monitoring accuracy), initial test performance was statistically equivalent for texts that were selected for restudy (M = .43) than for texts that were not selected (M = .49). By contrast, for participants in the delayed group, initial test performance was substantially less for selected texts (M = .27) than for unselected ones (M = .78). Thus, as expected, the participants in the delayed group used their monitoring to isolate less well learned items for restudy. As important, the benefits of this decision were evident after restudy. As compared to their performance on the initial test, the change in performance for the immediate group on the second test was negligible for the selected texts (.51), which were restudied, and for the unselected texts (.46), which were not. For the delayed group, performance on the second test improved substantially for the selected texts (.71) and little loss was observed for the unselected ones (.67). These outcomes strongly support the proposed influence of accurate self-monitoring, which allows learners to select materials that can benefit from restudy. Study 2: Acquired Brain Injury and Associative Learning Kennedy, Carney, and Peters (2003) reported evidence relevant to whether accurate monitoring could benefit the associative learning of adults with acquired, diffuse brain injury (ABI), who often show memory deficits. Kennedy et al. (2003) had ABI adults use two techniques to monitor learning, which yielded different levels of monitoring accuracy. In particular, when studying paired associates (e.g., canyon scream), an individual can monitor learning by covering a response (e.g., by putting a hand over scream) and judging the likelihood that the response will later be recalled when canyon is presented again. This judgment can be made either immediately after studying a given pair, or it can be delayed until several minutes after study. Monitoring accuracy is substantially better for the latter delayed judgments than for the immediate judgments (Nelson & Dunlosky, 1991), even for those with frontal injury (Kennedy & Yorkston, in press). Intuition suggests why. When making a judgment (e.g., for canyon - ?) a minute or so after studying other items, learners have a chance to test their memory for the response. Because the outcomes of these delayed selftests (e.g., whether a response is recalled) are highly predictive of criterion test performance, they support high levels of monitoring accuracy. Will gains in accuracy achieved by delaying the judgments also improve learning as predicted by the self-monitoring approach? Method Overview In Kennedy et al.s study, 18 adults with ABI studied two lists of 36 paired associates each. Adults with ABI averaged 31.8 years of age with 13.3 years of education. All but one adult with ABI had sustained a traumatic blow to the head or traumatic brain injury (TBI); the majority had sustained severe injuries (13), and fewer had sustained moderate (3) and mild (1) in7

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SELF-MONITORING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING juries. One adult with ABI had sustained anoxic, diffuse brain damage from a respiratory attack. Participants studied paired associates, made itemby-item judgments of learning, and selected items to restudy. After item selection, an initial recall trial occurred, which was followed by restudy of selected items and a final test trial across all items (regardless of whether they had been selected for restudy). They were instructed to do their best to learn every pair, and they were allowed to choose six items from each list for restudy (cf. Nelson, Dunlosky, Graf, & Narens, 1994). Thus, the ABI participants made explicit judgments of self monitoring during an initial study trial and were given the opportunity to control learning by selecting items for restudy. During the initial study phase of the first list, participants made immediate judgments for half of the items and delayed judgments for the other half. After making each immediate judgment, they decided whether to restudy the judged item on the subsequent study trial. Next, they had an initial trial of pairedassociate recall, which could be used to estimate the accuracy of the two kinds of judgment. The participants then restudied the items that they had chosen for restudy, followed by a final test of paired-associate recall for all the pairs. Finally, this same sequence occurred again for items on the second list, except in this case, after making each delayed judgment, participants decided whether to select the judged item for restudy. Results Monitoring accuracy was operationalized by intraindividual correlations between the judgments (either immediate or delayed) with recall performance on the initial recall trial. The accuracy of ABI patients judgments at predicting initial recall was reliably greater for delayed judgments (M correlation = .86) than for immediate judgments (M correlation = .47), t(64) = 3.82. Moreover, ABI adults chose to restudy items that they had judged as less well learned. Given that ABI adults (a) showed greater accuracy for delayed then immediate judgments and (b) used monitoring to control restudy, greater gains were expected in recall performance across trials when the ABI patients monitored learning using delayed judgments. Consistent with this expectation, gains from the initial recall trial to the final recall trial were greater after delayed judgments than after immediate judgments. Thus, even though ABI adults often show deficits, their learning of new materials can benefit from accurate self-monitoring when they have the opportunity to control learning. Study 3: Aging in Adulthood and Self-monitoring Training of Associative Learning Dunlosky, Kubat-Silman, and Hertzog (2003) invited older adults (ranging from 65 to 85 years in age)
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to participate in a memory training program that was based on the principles of the self-monitoring approach. Similar to adults with ABI, older adults show deficits in associative learning but their ability to accurately monitor learning remains intact (for a review, see Hertzog & Hultsch, 2000). The memory-training program focused on improving associative learning by training older adults to test themselves periodically through learning, which is akin to having them make the highly accurate delayed judgments of learning described above. This training was expected to improve older adults learning beyond that garnered by training more traditional mnemonics. Method Overview To evaluate the efficacy of training, three groups were included. The control group (n = 31) did not receive training, and the strategy-control group (n = 31) was trained to use standard mnemonics (sentence generation and interactive imagery) to learn pairs by associating the two words of each pair. The self-monitoring group (n = 33) received the same mnemonic training but also was trained (a) to test themselves during study (a la making delayed judgments that benefited ABI patients learning in Kennedy et al., 2003) and (b) to use the outcome of these self tests to control learning. Training included two 2-hour sessions that were separated by about a week. Two trainers instructed older adults on how to apply the mnemonics (both training groups) and on how to accurately self monitor learning (self-monitoring group only). Training involved only associative learning. As training continued, participants extensively practiced the trained techniques (monitoring and/or mnemonics) using increasingly greater numbers of paired-associate items. Tests were administered individually before and after training so as to evaluate the efficacy of the selfmonitoring approach. One test involved self-paced learning in which participants had 20 minutes to learn 60 paired associates. Pilot data demonstrated that the 20-min limit allowed ample time for restudying the items multiple times. For self-paced learning, participants were given a stack of 60 index cards, with a paired associate typed on one side of each card. Participants were instructed to study the pairs in any way they chose. Participants were tested individually and were video taped during the self-paced study task. After self-paced study, a paired-associate test was administered: Each stimulus was presented alone on a computer screen, and participants were instructed to type the correct response. The self-monitoring group was expected to show the greatest gains on this self-paced task because they were trained with paired associates and were allowed to regulate their learning. An experimenter-paced version of the same task was also administered. Because this task does not afford the

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SELF-MONITORING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING control of learning, relatively small training gains were expected.
Pre-training tests Post-training tests 1 Covering responses 0.9 Sorting 0.9 1

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Figure 2. The mean proportion of participants who covered responses (left panel) or sorted items (right panel) during self-paced associative learning. See text for details on how these measures were computed. Values in this figure were not included in the original report of this training program (Dunlosky et al., 2003).

Also, self-paced and experimenter-paced versions of a word learning task (40 words per list) were administered, which included studying 40 words (per task) followed by free recall of the individual words. These tasks were used to assess whether skills trained for associative learning would transfer to other learning conditions. Results The results demonstrated both the benefits and limits of the self-monitoring approach. Beginning with the latter, training had a minimal influence on performance for the word learning tasks. Thus, training selfmonitoring skills for associative learning did not transfer to list learning, which is not surprising given that many mnemonic techniques show negligible transfer (Ball et al., 2002; Verhaeghen, Marcoen, & Goossens, 1992). Training older adults to monitor by self testing had the predicted influences on associative learning. As expected, the training effects for the experimenterpaced task were small and usually unreliable. By contrast, for the self-paced task of associative learning, older adults who were trained to self monitor showed a 21% gain in learning. This training effect was also considerably larger for the self-monitoring group than for the strategy control group (who showed only an 8% gain), indicating that self monitoring boosted gains

above those obtained from training standard mnemonics alone. According to the current approach, self monitoring benefited learning because participants used it to control learning by allocating time to items that were less well learned. To explore this possibility, participants were video taped as they paced their study of the pairs. Several measures were recorded from the video tapes. First, the amount of time on task did not differ for the two groups (average study time was on average about 19.5 minutes for both groups). Thus, the superior gains demonstrated by the self-monitoring group was not due to using more study time. Second, we evaluated whether each individual covered responses during study, which provided an indirect measure of whether participants monitored learning via self-testing (cf. Murphy, Schmitt, Caruso, & Sanders, 1987). For instance, for the item doctor lobster, a participant would be scored as covering responses if another index card or hand were used to cover the word lobster. Finally, we scored whether each participant sorted the pairs (each of which was typed on a separate index card) into two or more stacks, which provided an indirect measure of whether they were isolating less well learned items for restudy. The proportion of participants who exhibited each of these specific strategic behaviors are presented in Figure 2. As evident from inspection of the left panel of Figure 2, the self-monitoring group covered responses more often after training than before, t (32) = 3.73, whereas covering responses did not reliably change across time for the strategy group, t < 2.0. Moreover, prior to training, sorting did not reliably differ between the self monitoring and strategy group, t < 1.9. By contrast, after training, the self-monitoring group sorted reliably more often than the strategy group, t (58) = 2.91, t (60) = 3.05. These results suggest that older adults who were trained to self test were not only capable of doing so but also used the outcome of these tests to control restudy. General Discussion Taken together, these studies provide new evidence that supports the efficacy of the self-monitoring approach for effective learning. Key outcomes included that greater levels of monitoring accuracy supported higher levels of test performance after restudy, both for undergraduates studying text materials and for ABI patients learning simple associations. Training older adults to use a form of accurate monitoring also enhanced their associative learning. As important, more fine-grained analyses from these studies highlighted principles and limitations of the self-monitoring approach. In particular, accurate self-monitoring improved learning because it allowed individuals to focus on items that could benefit from restudy, and the
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Proportion of Participants Who Exhibited Specific Strategic Behavior

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SELF-MONITORING FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING efficacy of monitoring to enhance learning was undermined when the task did not afford self regulation. Components of this approach are also evident in a training program used by Camp and his colleagues (e.g., see Camp & Stevens, 1990; Cherry, Simmons, & Camp, 1999) to assist patients with learning deficits. In general, a trainer may present an item (e.g., a nurses face and name) to the patient for study. Immediately after study, the trainer tests the patient by presenting the face alone, and the patient is asked to recall the name. If the patient cannot recall it, then the face and name are presented again for study, but if the name is correctly recalled, then further testing occurs in which the trainer systematically increases the length of the retention interval in an expanding sequence (e.g., 5, 10, 20, 40 seconds). This spaced-retrieval technique has lasting effects on retention of learned materials (Landauer & Bjork, 1978), even for patients with learning deficits (Cherry et al., 1999). The efficacy of spacedretrieval practice and the self-monitoring approach partly relies on the monitoring and regulation of learning, but the locus of these activities differs across the two. Namely, in this application of spaced-retrieval practice, the trainer monitors the patients memory through testing and also controls the patients learning through spaced practice, whereas for the selfmonitoring approach, the individual learner is encouraged to accurately monitor his or her own progress so as to effectively control learning. We want to emphasize again that the selfmonitoring approach is not meant to supplant other training techniques but instead may be used in combination with them. In fact, as implied by Figure 1, self monitoring may be adapted to support all mnemonic techniques. Of course, in evaluating the efficacy of a program that involves combining self-monitoring with other mnemonics, one must heed the limitations of the self-monitoring approach. Namely, such a hybrid program will not be successful unless (a) the accuracy of monitoring is relatively high and (b) learners are able to use their monitoring in service of allocating time to materials that require restudy. To capitalize fully on this approach to memory training, many questions will need to be addressed. First, as expected, boosting levels of monitoring accuracy can benefit self-regulated learning. But what level of monitoring accuracy is sufficient to achieve maximal gains, and does the importance of accuracy change across learning trials? Second, for some kinds of task, such as learning text material, the accuracy of peoples monitoring is notoriously low. Although techniques have been discovered that can enhance monitoring accuracy (e.g., using delayed keyword generation as described above), can these techniques be improved and will they be equally effective for different kinds of
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text? Third, we have presented some initial demonstrations of how accurate self-monitoring can improve learning. Although further research is required to fully understand when self-monitoring will be most beneficial for learning per se, other important educational outcomes also deserve systematic research. For instance, how can accurate self-monitoring be used to improve subsequent retention of materials (for one answer, see Son, 2004), and will it be equally useful in helping people better comprehend text materials? Finally, older adults and ABI adults apparently can benefit from accurate self-monitoring. But will individuals with other kinds of memory deficit also be able to benefit from the self-monitoring approach, and how should it be tailored to meet a given individuals needs? Systematic research aimed at answering these empirical questions will be necessary to fully exploit self-monitoring in the aid of learning. We believe that the evidence presented in this article foreshadows the eventual success of such research endeavors, and as important, it illustrates how the self-monitoring approach may complement existing mnemonic techniques to obtain even greater gains in learning. References
Ball, K., Berch, D.B., Helmers, K.F., Jobe, J.B., Leveck, M.D., Marsiske, M., Morris, J.N., Rebok, G.W., Smith, D.M., Tennstedt, S. L, Unverzagt, F. W., & Willis, S.L. (2002). Effects of cognitive training interventions with older adults: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of the American Medical Association, 288, 2271-2281 Benjamin, A.S., Bjork, R.A., & Schwartz, B.L. (1998). The mismeasure of memory: When retrieval fluency is misleading as a metacognitive index. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 127, 55-68. Camp, C.J., & Stevens, A.G. (1990). Spaced-retrieval: A memory intervention for dementia of the Alzheimers type. Clinical Gerontologist, 10, 58-61. Cherry, K.E., Simmons, S.S., & Camp, C.J. (1999). Spaced retrieval enhances memory in older adults with probable Alzheimers disease. Journal of Clinical Geropsychology, 5, 159-175. Dunlosky, J., Kubat-Silman, A.K., & Hertzog, C. (2003). Training monitoring skills improves older adults' self-paced associative learning. Psychology and Aging, 18, 340-350. Hertzog, C. & Hultsch, D.F. (2000). Metacognition in adulthood and aging. In T.A. Salthouse & F. I. M. Craik (Eds.), Handbook of Aging and Cognition II. Mahwah, NY: Erlbaum. Hill, R.D., Bckman, L., & Stigsdotter Neely, A. (Eds.) Cognitive Rehabilitation in Old Age. Oxford University Press: New York, NY. Kennedy, M.R.T., Carney, E. & Peters, S.M. (2003). Predictions of recall and study strategy decisions after diffuse brain injury. Brain Injury, 17, 1043-1064. Kennedy, M. R. T. & Yorkston, K.M. (in press). The effects of frontal injury on self-monitoring during verbal learning by adults with diffuse brain injury. Neuropsychological Rehabilitation.

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