Putting the Comprehension in Metacomprehension

Abstract

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...

Generating keywords improves metacomprehension and self-regulation in elementary and middle school children

“…A sample text and test questions can be found in Appendix A. As suggested by Wiley et al (2005), the texts were developed so that important elements of the situation model were not explicit in the surface form of the text (i.e., the causal connections among ideas in the texts were not stated and needed to be generated by the reader). Each text was approximately 350 words long-two teachers verified that the reading level was appropriate for students.…”

What is the Basis for Self-assessment of Comprehension when Reading Mathematical Expository Texts?

“…For some mathematical texts, students seem to base their self-assessment more directly on their reading comprehension while for other texts they base their self-assessment to a larger extent on their prior experiences in mathematics. Therefore, the present study shows the importance of examining different types of texts, which was also stressed by Wiley et al (2005). However, the present study also stresses the importance of distinguishing between texts within one of the categories of texts given by Wiley et al (2005).…”

“…Both texts were approximately one page long. These texts were not as short as texts often used in previous research on self-assessment in reading, where often only a single paragraph has been used (Wiley et al, 2005). Such short texts reduce the possibility to cover more complex topics and also to readily examine all levels of reading comprehension, since sufficient structural complexity is needed in order to "allow for comprehension tests that are not heavily influenced by surface memory" (p. 411).…”

“…Such short texts reduce the possibility to cover more complex topics and also to readily examine all levels of reading comprehension, since sufficient structural complexity is needed in order to "allow for comprehension tests that are not heavily influenced by surface memory" (p. 411). Both texts used in this study had enough structural complexity since they focused on logical connections between ideas presented in them, and they can therefore be described as explanatory types of text (see Wiley et al, 2005).…”

“…In addition, some studies have also varied the types of questions used and not found any significant differences regarding the level of calibration (e.g., Glenberg & Epstein, 1987;Lin, Moore, & Zabrucky, 2001). A limitation in such studies is that they usually have not utilized theories of reading comprehension that specify different dimensions or components of comprehension (see Wiley, Griffin, & Thiede, 2005). Furthermore, there are studies that have varied aspects of the experimental situation (such as the types of texts used), which have resulted in significant differences in calibration (Lin & Zabrucky, 1998;Schommer & Surber, 1986).…”