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Although self-regulated learning (SRL) is becoming increasingly important in modern educational contexts, disagreements exist regarding its measurement. One particularly important issue is whether self-reports represent valid ways to measure this process. Several researchers have advocated the use of behavioral indicators of SRL instead. An outstanding research debate concerns the extent to which it is possible to compare behavioral measures of SRL to traditional ways of measuring SRL using self-report questionnaire data, and which of these methods provides the most valid and reliable indicator of SRL. The current review investigates this question. It was found that granularity is an important concept in the comparison of SRL measurements, influencing the degree to which students can accurately report on their use of SRL strategies. The results show that self-report questionnaires may give a relatively accurate insight into students' global level of self-regulation, giving them their own value in educational research and remediation. In contrast, when students are asked to report on specific SRL strategies, behavioral measures give a more accurate account. First and foremost, researchers and practitioners must have a clear idea about their research question or problem statement, before choosing or combining either form of measurement.

The current study investigated kindergarteners and second graders' ability to monitor and evaluate their own and a virtual peer's performance in a paired-associate learning task. Participants provided confidence judgments (CJs) for their own responses and performance-based judgments (judgments provided after receiving feedback on their performance) for both their own and a virtual peer's responses. For the performance-based judgments, children were confronted with their own or the peer's answer as well as the correct answer. Additionally, participants were asked to credit their own and the peer's correct and incorrect answers while facing feedback. Results indicate an age-related progression in metacognitive monitoring skills, with second graders differentiating more strongly in their confidence judgments between correct and incorrect responses compared to kindergarteners. Regarding performance-based judgments, children of both age groups provided higher judgments for correctly compared to incorrectly recognized items as well as for their own responses in comparison to the responses of the unknown child. Similarly, when crediting, participants of both age groups gave more credits for correct recognition than for incorrect recognition and for their own responses than for the peer's responses. The significant interaction between age group and recognition accuracy for the crediting shows that second graders gave more credits for correctly recognized items while kindergarteners gave more credits for incorrect answers than the older children - primarily for their own incorrect answers. In conclusion, the study provides new insights into 6- and 8-year-olds' evaluations of their own and an unknown child's performance in a paired-associate learning task by showing that children of both age groups generally judged and credited responses in their own favor. These results add to our understanding of biases in children's performance evaluations, including metacognitive judgments and judgments provided after receiving feedback.

Since emergence of the field ‘Educational Neuroscience’ (EN) in the late nineties of the previous century, a debate has emerged about the potential this field holds to influence teaching and learning in the classroom. By now, most agree that the original claims promising direct translations to teaching and learning were too strong. I argue here that research questions in (health professions) education require multi-methodological approaches, including neuroscience, while carefully weighing what (combination of) approaches are most suitable given a research question. Only through a multi-methodological approach will convergence of evidence emerge, which is so desperately needed for improving teaching and learning in the classroom. However, both researchers and teachers should become aware of the so-called ‘seductive allure’ of EN; that is, the demonstrable physical location and apparent objectivity of the measurements can be interpreted as yielding more powerful evidence and warranting stronger conclusions than, e.g., behavioral experiments, where in fact oftentimes the reverse is the case. I conclude that our tendency as researchers to commit ourselves to one methodological approach and to addressing educational research questions from a single methodological perspective is limiting progress in educational science and in translation to education.

Medical students struggle to put into practice communication skills learned in medical school. In order to improve our instructional designs, better insight into the cause of this lack of transfer is foundational. We therefore explored students' cognitions by soliciting self-evaluations of their history-taking skills, coined 'judgments of satisfaction (JOSs)'. Our cognitive-psychological approach was guided by Koriat's cue-utilization framework (J Exp Psychol Gen 126:349-370. doi: 10.1037/0096-3445.126.4.349 , 1997) which rests on the assumption that internal and external cues inform learners' metacognitive judgments, which, in turn, steer their actions. Judgments based on unsuitable cues will cause ineffective behavior. Consequently, students are unable to adequately master these skills or properly apply them in similar situations. For the analysis, we had 524 medical undergraduates select scenes they were satisfied or dissatisfied with from their video-recorded simulated-patient encounters and explain why. Twenty transcripts were sampled for directed content analysis. We found that approximately one-third of students' judgments focused on content (JOS-type-a); about half on the quality of the communication skills (JOS-type-b); and about ten percent targeted the appropriateness of the skills harnessed (JOS-type-c). This lack of reflection on appropriateness may explain why students experience problems adapting to new situations. It was primarily high-performance students who formed type-c judgments; poor performers tended to give type-a and type-b judgments. Future research would benefit from the use of our modified version of Koriat's framework in order to further explore how high and poor performing medical students differ in the way they form JOSs during communications skills training.

When studying verbal materials, both adults and children are often poor at accurately monitoring their level of learning and regulating their subsequent restudy of materials, which leads to suboptimal test performance. The present experiment investigated how monitoring accuracy and regulation of study could be improved when learning idiomatic phrases. Elementary school children (fourth and sixth-graders) were instructed to predict their test performance by providing judgments of learning (JOLs). They provided JOLs immediately after studying each idiom, after studying all idioms, or after studying all idioms followed by generating sentences in which the idioms were used. Correlations between JOLs and test performance showed that delayed-JOLs and delayed-JOLs with sentence generation were more accurate than immediate JOLs. JOLs after sentence generation also improved regulation of study compared to delayed-JOLs only. Analyses of JOL reaction times suggest that delayed-JOLs led children to retrieve the literal meaning of the idiom, whereas JOLs after sentence generation led children to focus on connections between studied information, contextual information, and prior knowledge. Sentence generation presents a promising method to improve regulation of study, and thus idiom learning.