Restudy decision protocol

Use a defined decision rule — not a feeling — to determine which items get additional study.

Why it works

JOLs influence restudy decisions: learners drop items they rate as learned and spend more time on items they rate as not learned. When JOLs are inaccurate, this allocation is counterproductive — easy, familiar items get over-studied; hard items that generate low JOLs but are still above the retention threshold get abandoned. A defined protocol decouples the restudy decision from fluctuating feelings and ties it to objective performance criteria.

How to do it

1. Define your threshold: an item is ready to drop only if it was recalled correctly without prompting on two non-adjacent tests.
2. Apply the threshold uniformly — do not override it because an item "feels solid."
3. Review dropped items at a defined interval (one week) to verify retention.
4. Reinstate dropped items that fail the retention check without changing the threshold.

Evidence

Restudy allocation research shows that criterion-based dropping rules outperform JOL-based dropping in producing long-term retention, because they prevent premature withdrawal from items that feel familiar but are not durably encoded. (mechanistic)

Formal criterion-based protocols are studied in controlled lab settings; the specific threshold ("two correct recalls") is a practical guideline, not a universally tested value.

Common mistake

Dropping an item from restudy after a single correct recall, when the item is accessible now but has not been tested at a delay — producing a one-hit wonder that will fail at retention.