Training Monitoring Skills Improves Older Adults' Self-Paced Associative Learning

We investigated a memory-enhancement program that involved teaching older adults to regulate study through self-testing. A regulation group was taught standard strategies along with self-testing techniques for identifying less well-learned items that could benefit from extra study. This group was compared with a strategy-control group, which was taught only strategies, and with a waiting-list control group. Greater training gains were shown for the regulation group (effect size, d = 0.72) than for the strategy-control ( d = 0.28) and waiting-list control ( d = 0.03) groups, indicating that training a monitoring skill-self-testing-can improve older adults' learning.