Effect of the difficulty of prior items on the magnitude of judgments of learning for subsequent items.

Research on metacognition often uses various kinds of paired-associate items (e.g., foreign language translation equivalents) to investigate judgments of learning (JOLs) under the assumption that the JOLs are made independently of each other. We tested this assumption by exploring the effect of manipulating the difficulty of prior Swahili-English translation equivalents to determine whether there is a contrasting change in the magnitude of the JOLs assigned to subsequent Swahili-English translation equivalents (e.g., intermediate-difficulty items might receive lower JOLs when following easy items than when following difficult items). The magnitude of JOLs for the subsequent items did not vary as a function of the difficulty of the prior items, even when there were 10 prior items of homogeneous difficulty that differed from the difficulty of the subsequent to-be-judged items.