Adding judgments of understanding to the metacognitive toolbox

•Students viewed a computer-based multimedia lesson on how solar cells work.•Students made judgments of understanding (JOU) and judgments of learning (JOL).•JOU ratings were highly correlated with retention and transfer scores.•JOL ratings were moderately correlated with retention and transfer scores.•JOUs and JOLs framed based on difficulty were less predictive of test scores.

Two experiments investigated how the framing of metacognitive judgment prompts affects metacognitive accuracy. In Experiment 1, college students viewed a multimedia science lesson and were asked to make either judgments of learning (JOLs) or judgments of understanding (JOUs). The results indicated large correlations of JOUs with retention and transfer, and medium correlations of JOLs with retention and transfer. In Experiment 2, college students received the same lesson along with metacognitive prompts framed in terms of one's amount of knowledge (“how much”), one's confidence in knowledge (“how confident”), one's ability to answer questions (“how many”), or one's perceived difficulty in learning (“how difficult”). The former three judgments significantly predicted retention and transfer performance, but the judgment of difficulty did not significantly predict transfer. These results show the benefits of including judgments of understanding and transfer tests in studies that examine metacomprehension, and the importance of choosing appropriate wording for judgment prompts.