Global vs. local JOL separation

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.

How to do it

1. At the end of a session, rate the session overall (1–10 for productivity and difficulty).
2. Then rate each item individually on a separate scale, without reference to the session rating.
3. Notice items where your item-level rating diverges sharply from the session rating — investigate those.
4. Base restudy decisions on item-level ratings, not on global session impressions.

Evidence

Mood 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. (mechanistic)

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.