Metacognitive judgments are assessed by looking at the relationship (i.e., correlation) between the learner’s prediction of how well she thinks she will do on a future test and the actual performance on that test. Metacognitive judgments are thought to be accurate if high and positive correlations are found, i.e., the higher the learner’s prediction of their understanding and future test performance, the higher their actual test performance. A perfect correlation would have a value of 1. In such a scenario, a students’ prediction and their test performance would match perfectly. However, research has shown that students are generally quite poor in judging what they know and don’t know. Maki (2) summarized findings from different studies and found metacognitive accuracy to be at only .27. Be aware: A correlation of 0 would mean that there is no relationship between one’s prediction and the actual test score and a value of only .27 indicates a quite weak association, on which you certainly should not base your study decisions on. This shows that students are usually overconfident in what they have grasped about a topic and this translates into – for them often surprisingly – low test scores.

But there is no need to panic: Keep calm and enjoy the recommendations that research has shown to improve your metacognition. Let’s look at some studies that have investigated different strategies to increase your metacognitive accuracy for studying textbook passages.