Older adults show no reliable deficit in assessing item difficulty (EOL accuracy)¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causal r2 · q3
Currency · newest study 2010 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person

Subclaims¶

q3 i? Ease-of-learning judgments aligned with normative difficulty in both age groups, with slightly higher but non-reliable resolution for younger adults. → Price 2010

Evidence¶

Price 2010¶

Price, Jodi; Hertzog, Christopher; Dunlosky, John. (2010). Self-Regulated Learning in Younger and Older Adults: Does Aging Affect Metacognitive Control? Neuropsychology, development, and cognition. Section B, Aging, neuropsychology and cognition. https://doi.org/10.1080/13825580903287941

q3 · i? · causal · r2

Experiment 1 Goodman-Kruskal gamma correlations of EOLs with normative difficulty; the printed means were .75 (younger) versus .69 (older), "t (94) = 1.69, p > .05". A parallel Experiment 2 comparison (.73 vs .64) was also not reliable.

"Younger adults had slightly higher resolution than did older adults, but the difference was not reliable (younger M = .75, SE = .01 versus older M = .69, SE = .04), t (94) = 1.69, p > .05.These results rule out the hypothesis that older adults cannot accurately assess item difficulty."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Younger and older adults select study items in an easy-to-difficult order, consistent with the region of proximal learning model — related
• Older adults allocate proportionally more study time to easy and medium items while younger adults allocate more to difficult items, yet older adults recall less despite studying more — related
• Point values and point order altered item selection and recall: Easy First order produced higher recall, and points increased goal pursuit but appeared to hurt recall — related
• Aging does not materially reduce the relative accuracy (resolution) of judgments of learning during encoding, with cross-sectional evidence of no age declines and even age-related increases in aggregate JOL resolution across ages 18 to 81 — related
• FOK resolution for general-knowledge information is similar for younger and older adults, whereas the literature argues for a deficit in FOK resolution for episodic memory tasks in older adults — related
• Judgments of learning are higher for easy than difficult items at all ages and increase with age, confirming the difficulty manipulation aligned with subjective difficulty — related
• Presentation format (sequential vs. simultaneous) does not reliably affect EOL accuracy — a narrower finding that bears on this claim
• JOL resolution (relative accuracy) did not differ between younger and older adults — related
• EOL judgments are highly accurate when items vary widely in difficulty within a list, but poorly accurate when variation is small — related