Chapter 2 regulating metacognitive processes— support for a meta-metacognitive ability

Abstract

Second-order judgments aim to regulate metacognitive judgments or at least to assess the accuracy of metacognitive judgments (first-order judgments). For this reason, second-order judgments can be seen as a form of meta-metacognition. In this chapter, we clarify the concept of meta-metacognition and how it relates to first-order metacognitive judgments. Furthermore, we explain why the concept of second-order judgments is an important addition to the research literature on metacognition and why it is an important concept in the context of learning and memory. We also present a new generalizable method for eliciting and measuring the accuracy (realism) of second-order judgments in the context of confidence judgments of semantic and episodic memory performance and suggest how this method can be computer implemented. An asset of this method is that it allows for fine-grained analyses of the strategies that people use when they make second-order judgments without reverting to think-aloud reports.