The methodology for research about ease of learning judgements : does sequential and simultaneous judgements create different results?

Abstract: Metacognition involves different evaluations of your own thinking- and learning process. Ease of learning (EOL) means judging how difficult for example a word is to learn. When researching about EOLs, different methods have been used in the past. In an experiment that tested glossaries, the methodology for measuring EOLs was investigated in this study. In the experiment, a comparison was made between making a sequential or simultaneous judgement of the difficulty of the words. A simultaneous judgement means judging one item while seeing the other items on the list, and a sequential judgement means judging while only seeing the word pair you are to judge. The result of this experiment was in line with previous research in that EOL judgments significantly, but only moderately so, predict the actual learnability of the items. However, the difference between a sequential and simultaneous judgement and their correlation with recall was not significant. There was a tendency towards better EOLs being made with simultaneous judgements, having a 30 % higher correlation with recall than sequential judgements.