Global vs. local JOL separation
Rate individual items separately from your general sense of "how the session went" — they diverge.
Key takeaways
- What it is: Rate individual items separately from your general sense of "how the session went" — they diverge.
- Why it works: Learners tend to let global mood and session-level experience contaminate item-level JOLs. If a session felt productive, all items receive upward-adjusted JOLs; if it felt difficult, all items are rated lower. This contamination reduces item-level discriminability — the ability to correctly distinguish what is well-encoded from what is not — which is the information restudy decisions depend on.
- Evidence: Plausible mechanism, limited direct outcome data.
- Avoid: Using a generally good or bad feeling about a session to infer that everything in the session was well-learned or poorly-learned, which wipes out item-level discriminability.
Why it works
Learners tend to let global mood and session-level experience contaminate item-level JOLs. If a session felt productive, all items receive upward-adjusted JOLs; if it felt difficult, all items are rated lower. This contamination reduces item-level discriminability — the ability to correctly distinguish what is well-encoded from what is not — which is the information restudy decisions depend on.
How to do it
- 1At the end of a session, rate the session overall (1–10 for productivity and difficulty).
- 2Then rate each item individually on a separate scale, without reference to the session rating.
- 3Notice items where your item-level rating diverges sharply from the session rating — investigate those.
- 4Base restudy decisions on item-level ratings, not on global session impressions.
What the evidence says
MechanisticMood and general context contaminate metacognitive judgments in memory research — a variant of context effects on confidence. Separating global from local judgments is a practitioner technique for reducing this contamination.
Honest caveat: The specific protocol (separate global and item ratings explicitly) is a practitioner adaptation; the underlying contamination effect is documented in metacognition research but the exact protocol is not independently tested.
Common mistake
Using a generally good or bad feeling about a session to infer that everything in the session was well-learned or poorly-learned, which wipes out item-level discriminability.
IX Coach collects item-level and session-level ratings separately, and shows you the divergence between your global impression and your item-level evidence — so your restudy allocation follows the data.
Practice this with IX Coach →