Abstract. Students are often overconfident in educational settings and struggle to differentiate between well-learned and poorly-learned concepts. The present article reviews current research on strategies that help students assess their understanding, with a focus on research using authentic educational tasks and materials. We propose a framework for these strategies that we refer to as wait-generate-validate. The wait-generate-validate strategies can give students a more objective measure of their learning from lectures, understanding of course concepts, text comprehension, problem-solving ability, and test preparedness. These strategies have been shown to lead to more effective study decisions and greater learning. Lastly, we translate the reviewed research into practical tips for students and teachers and conclude with recommendations for future research regarding how students judge their learning in diverse educational contexts.

Previous research has shown that even when famous people's identities cannot be discerned from faces that have been filtered with monochromatic noise, these unidentifiable famous faces still tend to receive higher familiarity ratings than similarly filtered non-famous faces. Experiment 1 investigated whether a similar face recognition without identification effect would occur among faces whose identification was hindered through the wearing of a surgical mask. Among a mixture of famous and non-famous faces wearing surgical masks and hoods, participants rated how familiar each person seemed then attempted to identify the person. Though surgical masks significantly impaired identification of the famous faces, unidentified masked famous faces received higher familiarity ratings on average than the non-famous masked faces, suggesting that a sense of familiarity could still occur even when identification was impaired by the mask. Experiment 2 compared faces covered by surgical masks with faces covered by sunglasses. Though sunglasses impaired face identification more than surgical masks, the magnitude of the face recognition without identification effect was the same in both cases. This pattern suggests that holistic face processing is not a requirement for the sense of familiarity with a face, and that different facial feature types can contribute.