Whenever you predict to correctly (uncorrectly) answer a question, you are doing a metacognitive judgment (from now onwards named here JOL for judgment of learning). Later on you can take a test in order to know how accurate were your predictions. For more detailed information on JOLs and other kinds of metacognitive judgments see Dunlosky & Bjork (2008).

Following a model by Weaver and colleagues (Weaver, 1990; Weaver & Kelemen, 1997, 2003), this application gives you the opportunity to simulate the behavior of groups of people doing once and again such a task: predicting the expected hit for a set of items and answering later on these items in a test. You can imagine a group of participants doing the tasks under a certain experimental condition (as when JOLs are done just after learning some material) and another group under other conditions (JOLs done after a delay from the study phase). You can contrast the second group participants against the first group participants as predictors of their achievements in the final test.

BASIC STEPS FOR RUNNING A SIMULATION

  1. Global parameters definition: Selecting the menu Simulations>Parameters you can define your desired values for a few global parameters of the simulation. For more information see the Parameters page.
  2. Featuring the core simulation mechanism: The menu Simulations>Simulation engine will open a page with some slots for defining the specific (probabilistic) properties of the prediction mechanism.
  3. Contrasting different simulation conditions: The final step is to contrast the metacognitive efficiency under the different conditions you have defined before. The menu Simulations>Simulator starts the metacognitive processor and (perhaps after a few seconds, depending on your computer) gives you some statistical information about contrasts between simulated conditions. For more information see the Simulator page.