Karpicke’s research points to a possible explanation: Human beings don’t have the ability to know with certainty how well they’ve learned something. Instead, we need to rely on clues from our experience of studying to give us a feeling about how well we’re doing. These so-called judgments of learning (JOLs) are based, in part, on how fluently we can process something. If the learning task feels easy and smooth, we are more likely to believe we’ve learned it. If the task feels like a struggle, we’ll feel we haven’t learned it yet. Immediately after spending some time studying, these JOLs may
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