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Children's awareness about their own cognitive skills, or metacognition, has been hypothesized to play a major role in their learning and development. This role was examined in an experimental study of third and fifth graders' reading comprehension. Children from four classrooms were given an experimental curriculum, Informed Strategies for Learning (ISL), that was designed to increase children's awareness and use of effective reading strategies. Children who participated in ISL made larger gains than did children in control classrooms on cloze and error detection tasks. No differences between groups were found on two standardized tests of reading comprehension. This study demonstrates that metacognition can be promoted through direct instruction in classrooms and that increased awareness can lead to better use of reading strategies.

Abstract. This study was designed to examine children's ability to learn new information from textual materials. It investigated the extent to which equally intelligent average and poor readers could recognize and recall information from expository texts. Two types of explicit and four types of inferential information were tested through recognition items. Subjects recognized more explicit than inferential information, although some inference types were more difficult than others to recognize. In addition, the study examined the extent to which acquisition of new information was a function of prior knowledge. The probability of a correct response was computed for three different prior knowledge conditions: 1) correct, 2) wrong, or 3) unknown. This permitted investigation of the effect of prior knowledge on subjects' acquisition of new information, as well as subjects' ability to correct old information. Prior knowledge was a powerful factor in reading comprehension for both average and poor readers. Both groups were better at acquiring totally new information than at correcting old information that was inaccurate. Even when prior knowledge was contradicted by the text, subjects used it, rather than textual information, for item recognition. Only when they did not, or believed they did not, possess the necessary prior knowledge did they resort to text-with a consequent improvement in recognition.When we say that individuals have good comprehension of textual material, we generally mean that they have successfully integrated the information from text with their existing knowledge and also that they have learned any new information presented. However, the issue of comprehension as the acquisition of new information has been skirted in the literature. Most researchers have concerned themselves only with measures of post-reading comprehension.

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