Reading an Analogy Can Cause the Illusion of Comprehension

Abstract

This study explored students' ability to evaluate their learning from a multimedia inquiry unit about the causes of global climate change. Participants were 90 sixth grade students from four science classrooms. Students were provided with a text describing the causes of climate change as well as graphs showing average global temperature changes. Half of the students also received an analogy to help support their understanding of the topic. Results indicated that overall students were overconfident about how much they learned and how well they understood the topic. Further, the presence of an analogy led to higher levels of overconfidence. Results also indicated that students with better graph interpretation skills were less overconfident even when the analogy was present. These results suggest that the presence of graphs and analogies can negatively affect students' abilities to accurately judge their own level of understanding and may lead to an illusion of comprehension.

How restudy decisions affect overall comprehension for seventh‐grade students

“…These results also suggest that the larger obstacle to overcome for effective self‐regulated learning remains monitoring accuracy. This is consistent with other research that suggests that younger students may often use invalid cues to judge their comprehension from texts (Jaeger & Wiley, ) and that readers may need to be instructed to use cues based in their attempts to generate connections among ideas, rather than using cues such as interest in the topic or feelings of fluency (Thiede et al ., ). Our results point to the need for additional research to find ways to improve the ability of students to monitor their own comprehension when learning from text.…”

“…Gamma is a widely reported measure in the metacognition literature (Nelson, ). We also computed a Pearson correlation coefficient for each participant, which has been reported in the metacomprehension literature (Griffin, Jee, & Wiley, ; Griffin, Wiley, & Thiede, ; Jaeger & Wiley, ). For both measures, 127 of the 480 participants had indeterminate correlations due to invariance in their metacomprehension judgements and thus could not be included in subsequent analyses.…”

Singing and Accompaniment Support the Processing of Song Lyrics and Change the Lyrics' Meaning

“…However, perceived Clearness may not be the same as actual clearness. The prosodic clarity of sung language could be misleading in a similar way as the prosodic clarity of rhetorical features (Menninghaus et al, 2015), or the illusion of comprehension served by graphs or analogies in texts used for a science class (Jaeger & Wiley, 2015). Therefore, it is important to investigate whether listeners would, indeed, show higher results for an intelligibility or comprehension task in sung versus spoken language.…”

The use of examples in school science: Developing an analytical tool to enable a discussion in science teacher education

“…Indeed, analogies used to support learning -because they are assumed to be recognisable -can cause an illusion of comprehension among students (Jaeger & Wiley, 2015). The teacher thus needs to carefully plan teaching with analogies (Treagust, 2015).…”

“…There is thus the danger that the pupils read more into examples than they have grounds for (cf. Jaeger & Wiley, 2015) by making generalisations based on one example. The affective aspects of examples are important in engaging pupils at an emotional level, which in turn can be perceived as the environment for conceptual learning -as well as valuable in itself (Alsop & Watts, 2003).…”