Older adults demonstrate spared metacognitive monitoring abilities, despite cognitive decline in other domains. An extensive literature examines how accurately individuals engage in monitoring. The question of how often individuals engage in metacognition has been neglected. It is also possible that individuals who monitor more often also monitor more accurately, and age-related increases in monitoring contributes to older adults' intact monitoring abilities. In the current study, younger and older adults were assigned to one of two conditions. Control condition participants completed a learning task containing thought content probes. Experimental condition participants completed the same learning task containing both thought content probes and screens asking them to make judgments of learning (JOLs). This design allows us to compare monitoring frequency in younger and older adults, determine how making explicit metacognitive judgments alters propensity to engage in monitoring, and examine the relationship between monitoring frequency and monitoring accuracy within the experimental condition. Older adults engaged in more frequent monitoring than younger adults. Additionally, older adults who were required to provide JOLs engaged in more frequent monitoring than older adults who were not required to make JOLs. Finally, younger and older adults who engaged in more frequent monitoring were not found to have more.