Research has consistently found that liberals and conservatives generate different attributions for the causes of social problems and respond differently to people who have internal-controllable causes for needing help. Five studies using a variety of methods (the "college bowl" paradigm, the attitude-attribution paradigm, 2 surveys with nationally representative samples, and an experiment that assessed attributional judgments under varying levels of cognitive load) explored whether these differences could be explained by (a) underlying dispositional differences in the tendency to see the causes of behavior as personally or situationally located, (b) ideological scripts, or (c) differences in the motivation to correct personal attributions. Results were most consistent with the motivated correction explanation. The findings shed further light on the cognitive strategies and motivational priorities of liberals and conservatives.

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Two studies attempt to determine the causes of poor metacomprehension accuracy, and then, in turn, to identify interventions that circumvent these difficulties to support effective comprehension monitoring performance. The first study explored the cues that both at-risk and typical college readers use as a basis for their metacomprehension judgments in the context of a delayed summarization paradigm. Improvement was seen in all readers, but at-risk readers did not reach the same level of metacomprehension accuracy as a sample of typical college readers.Further, while few readers reported using comprehension-related cues, more at-risk readers reported using surface-related cues as the basis for their judgments. To support the use of more predictive cues among the at-risk readers, a second study employed a concept map intervention, which was intended to make situation model-level representations more salient. Concept mapping improved both the comprehension and metacomprehension accuracy of at-risk readers.The results suggest that poor metacomprehension accuracy can result from a failure to use appropriate cues for monitoring judgments, and that especially less-able readers need interventions that direct them to predictive cues for comprehension.This is an electronic version of an article published in Discourse Processes, 47(4). Discourse Processes is available online at: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp. DOI: 10.1080/01638530902959927Metacomprehension and Cue Use 3 Poor Metacomprehension Accuracy as a Result of Inappropriate Cue UseLearning from text is a standard adjunct to classroom instruction. Students are assigned reading for homework, where they are expected to study and understand textbook chapters or other texts. Models of self-regulated learning (e.g., Dunlosky & Thiede, 1998;Metcalfe, 2002;Nelson & Narens, 1990) suggest that metacognitive monitoring and regulation of study play an important role in such learning. Thiede, Anderson, and Therriault (2003) showed that monitoring accuracy (operationalized as the intra-individual correlation between metacomprehension judgments and test performance computed across texts 1 ) influenced decisions about which texts to restudy, which in turn affected learning from text. In particular, they showed that participants who more accurately monitored their comprehension made better decisions about which texts to reread than did participants who less accurately monitored their comprehension. That is, for a group with higher monitoring accuracy, participants chose to restudy primarily the texts that they did not understand. Their mean proportion correct on initial comprehension tests for the texts they selected to reread was .27 versus .78 for the texts they did not select to reread. By contrast, groups with lower monitoring accuracy showed less of a preference. The mean proportion correct on tests for the texts they selected to reread was .43versus .53 for those they did not select to reread. The more effective regulation of study among the group with higher monitoring acc...

The purpose of the present piece is to integrate some current theories of text comprehension with the body of work on metacomprehension, and especially the calibration of comprehension monitoring. This paper explores some important methodological and conceptual issues, inspired by current theories in the text comprehension literature, which suggest that the nature of the texts used for metacomprehension studies may be a critical, and currently unrecognized, factor that should be considered. First, we need to re-examine what we mean by "comprehension," and how we should measure it. There are important differences between memory for text and comprehension of text that need to be considered. Second, to fully deal with these concerns, we need to pay more attention to the kinds of expository text that are being used, the different ways that readers may understand these texts, and how readers may interpret the concept of "understanding" as they make their judgments.Research on self-regulated learning has been increasing in recent years, and with it an interest in metacognition or monitoring ability (see Hacker, Dunlosky, & Graesser, 1998;Zimmerman & Schunk, 2001). Many models of selfregulated learning describe learning as an interaction between metacognitive monitoring and control --also called regulation of study (e.g., Nelson & Narens, 1990;Thiede & Dunlosky, 1999; Winne & Butler, 1997). For instance, consider a student preparing for an exam. As the student studies, she monitors her progress toward the goal of mastering the material. If her monitoring indicates that she has not yet mastered the material, she will likely restudy the material. If her monitoring indicates mastery has been accomplished, then that material is not selected for restudy. Therefore, accurate metacognitive monitoring is critical to effective regulation of study (Winne & Perry, 2000). If a person is not able to accurately differentiate well-learned material from less-learned material, he or she could waste time studying material that is already well learned, or worse, fail to restudy material that has not yet been adequately learned (e.g., Dunlosky & Thiede, in press;Son & Metcalfe, 2000;Thiede & Dunlosky, 1999).Since expository text is so central to educational practice (especially in science and social studies instruction), the ability of students to monitor their own understanding of these texts seems very important. The general conclusion that has been reached, however, is that readers lack an ability to track their own comprehension, especially on expository texts. They are not very accurate when asked to predict their performance on a test (Glenberg, Wilkinson & Epstein, 1982;Maki & Berry, 1984;Weaver, 1990). They do not select the least understood texts for re-study (Thiede, Anderson, & Therriault, 2003). Findings such as these have led to the conclusion that readers lack metacomprehension skills. But, are readers really this poor at monitoring their own level of comprehension? We cannot confidently answer this question because...

This is an author-produced, peer-reviewed version of this article. The final, definitive version of this document can be found online at Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition,

Tests influence students' perceptions of what constitutes learning. Our findings suggest that this could affect how students prepare for tests and how they monitoring their own learning.

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