Think back to a time when you were revising. Think to a specific instance. For example, you may have had to memorise a formula for a science exam. You studied it for a while, trying to commit it to memory, and then you figured you knew it and moved on. But how did you know you’d learnt it properly?

A part of our brain, very much separate from the part that memorises, carries out the task of predicting whether we know something or not. Psychologists call this ‘Judgement of Learning’.

A recent (December 2005) fMRI study (carried out by the McGovern Institute at MIT) has pinpointed the area of the brain involved in this. You can find more about their results here).

My interest, however, is in how we can improve this ability.

Accurate judgement of learning has been shown to produce better test results in learners. The theory is: if you know you are not learning the material very well, you will adjust your learning strategy until you meet your learning goal.

One thing this highlights is the importance of setting good learning goals. If you don’t have specific goals you will not be able to judge whether you have reached them or not. Your learning will therefore, become random and unfocused, and you will not be able to predict whether you have learnt something well or not.

So how do we improve our judgement of learning?

A feedback loop should help enhance the ability. Here’s a strategy:

1. Set a short-term goal to learn something.
2. Go ahead and learn until you think you have reached your learning goal.
3. Set some kind of test that will provide good feedback on whether you achieved your learning goal or not.
4. Go back and relearn the material. Use the feedback from the tests to go back over your weak areas. Try to deduce where you can make improvements in your thinking and experiment with different strategies.

This continual feedback should enhance our ability to recognise when our learning has become memorable and usable in the future.

Obviously the skill of evaluating our own thoughts is one that needs practice. Learning about such things as memory techniques, understanding of logic, creativity techniques and problems solving skills, will help your ability to evaluate your own thoughts.

By experimenting with different ways of thinking, and checking the feedback from tests, we will gradually learn what makes a quality thought, and learn to intuitively recognise when we have reached that standard.

Further reading:
The News Room article from MIT on the fMRI study http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/learning.html

Cao, L. & Nietfeld, L. J. (2005, Feb 05). Judgment of Learning, Monitoring Accuracy, and Student Performance in the Classroom Context. Current Issues in Education [On-line], 8(4). http://cie.ed.asu.edu/volume8/number4/