Students' judgments of their own learning are often misled by intuitive yet false ideas about how people learn. In educational settings, learning experiences that minimize effort and increase the appearance of fluency, engagement, and enthusiasm often inflate students' estimates of their own learning, but do not always enhance their actual learning. We review the research on these "illusions of learning," how they can mislead students' evaluations of the effectiveness of their instructors, and how students' evaluations of teaching effectiveness can be biased by factors unrelated to teaching. We argue that the heavy reliance on student evaluations of teaching in decisions about faculty hiring and promotion might encourage teaching practices that boost students' subjective ratings of teaching effectiveness, but do not enhance-and may even undermine-students' learning and their development of metacognitive skills.

Researchers have often determined how cues influence judgments of learning (JOLs; e.g., concrete words are assigned higher JOLs than are abstract words), and recently there has been an emphasis in understanding why cues influence JOLs (i.e., the mechanisms that underlie cue effects on JOLs). The analytic-processing (AP) theory posits that JOLs are constructed in accordance with participants' beliefs of how a cue will influence memory. Even so, some evidence suggests that fluency is also important to cue effects on JOLs. In the present experiments, we investigated the contributions of participants' beliefs and processing fluency to the concreteness effect on JOLs. To evaluate beliefs, participants estimated memory performance in a hypothetical experiment (Experiment 1), and studied concrete and abstract words and made a pre-study JOL for each (Experiments 2 and 3). Participants' predictions demonstrated the belief that concrete words are more likely to be remembered than are abstract words, consistent with the AP theory. To evaluate fluency, response latencies were measured during lexical decision (Experiment 4), self-paced study (Experiment 5), and mental imagery (Experiment 7). Number of trials to acquisition was also evaluated (Experiment 6). Fluency did not differ between concrete and abstract words in Experiments 5 and 6, and it did not mediate the concreteness effect on JOLs in Experiments 4 and 7. Taken together, these results demonstrate that beliefs are a primary mechanism driving the concreteness effect on JOLs.

Students must retain information they learn in class over the long term because it may be foundational for upperlevel classes or for use in their field. Recently, researchers have demonstrated that making judgments of learning (JOLs) can enhance students' short-term performance; however, it is unclear how they influence long-term learning. We evaluated this issue in three experiments. Participants studied related word pairs (e.g., castle-king). Half of the participants made a JOL for each pair and half did not. Participants took a cued-recall test after either a long retention interval (2 days) or short retention interval (3 min). Participants who made JOLs outperformed participants who did not, which was evident on long-term learning as well as short-term performance. Continuously cumulating meta-analyses revealed that these effects were strong (long-term learning, d = .66; short-term performance, d = .71). Thus, making JOLs appears to be an effective strategy to increase long-term retention of related information.

The cue-utilization framework (Koriat, 1997) and the analytic processing theory (Dunlosky, Mueller, & Tauber, 2015) identify people's beliefs about their memory as central to how judgments of learning (JOLs) are made. This assumption is supported by ample evidence. However, researchers have almost exclusively explored the impact of participants' beliefs about the materials or the learning task, and none have evaluated the impact of beliefs about a person on JOLs. Thus, to inform JOL theory, we evaluated the degree to which JOLs are related to the belief that "memory declines with aging in adulthood." In seven experiments, college-aged participants studied words, made JOLs, and took a memory test. Participants made JOLs predicting memory performance for an average younger adult (i.e., 18-21 years old) or for an average older adult (i.e., 65+ years old). Most important, beliefs about aging in adulthood were not always sufficient to produce cue effects on JOLs, which contrasts with expectations from the aforementioned theories. An important challenge for future research will be to discover factors that moderate belief effects. To guide such explorations, we discuss possible explanations for why beliefs about aging would have demonstrated little to no relationship with people's JOLs.

Judgments of learning (JOLs) can improve younger adults' associative learning of related information. One theoretical explanation for this finding is that JOLs strengthen the relationship between the cue and target words of a related word pair. This cue-strengthening hypothesis is particularly relevant for older adults because learning interventions that enhance associations between items typically benefit their learning. Thus, we investigated the degree to which JOLs have a direct influence on older adults' learning. To do so, older and younger adults studied a list of related word pairs (Experiments 1 and 2) or weakly related word pairs (Experiments 3, 4, and 5). Half of the participants made a JOL for each pair and half did not. After a filled 3-min retention interval, participants took a cued-recall test. In all experiments, older adults' memory performance was not impacted by making JOLs. By contrast, younger adults who made JOLs recalled significantly more than those who did not. JOLs may not have modified older adults' learning because of age-related deficits in processing that limited the degree to which JOLs strengthened cue-target relationships. It is also possible that JOLs encourage attentional reorienting, which older adults do not benefit from because they are already engaged with the materials. An important direction for future work will be to explore these possibilities, as well as others.