Claims

Learners generally underestimate how fast they will learn word pairs, and this underconfidence is larger for low-variability lists

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causal r2 · q3 · i2 medium
Currency · newest study 2017 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims

Reading the evidence codes

q is the design tier, i the impact, n the sample, and the kind with its r the rigour judged within that kind: what each code means.

This claim: no standardized effect is recorded in observations/ for it yet, so no benchmark reading is possible.

q3 i2 In Experiment 1, participants judged they would need more study trials than they actually did, and this was reliably more pronounced for the low-variability list (M = −.85) than the high-variability list (M = −.58), d = 0.51. → Jemstedt 2017

Evidence

Jemstedt 2017

Jemstedt, A., Kubik, V., & Jönsson, F. U. (2017). What moderates the accuracy of ease of learning judgments? Metacognition and Learning, 12, 337–355. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11409-017-9172-3

q3 · i2 · causal · r2

Absolute-accuracy secondary analysis in Experiment 1 compared mean TTL judgments with actual TTL performance; t(30) = 2.20, p = .036, "d = 0.51". The authors relate the general underconfidence to a stability bias and note the low-variability list was in fact easier to learn across tests.

"Participants generally judged that they would need more study trials to learn each word pair than they actually did, and this effect was reliably more pronounced for the low- (M = −.85, SD = .69) than for the high-variability list ( M = −.58 SD =. 2 9 ) ,t(30) = 2.20, p = .036, mean difference = .27, 95% CI [.02, .52], d = 0.51."

Discussion

Page metadata
Field Value
type claim
id eol-underestimation-of-learnability
title Learners generally underestimate how fast they will learn word pairs, and this underconfidence is larger for low-variability lists
description Learners generally underestimate how fast they will learn word pairs, and this underconfidence is larger for low-variability lists
status review
evidence_strength weak
newest_evidence 2017
generated by process:wiki-ingest on 2026-10-19
trust unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
sources 1 — jemstedt-2017

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