The rereading effect: Metacomprehension accuracy improves across reading trials

Abstract

Guided by a hypothesis that integrates principles of monitoring from a cue-based framework of metacognitivejudgments with assumptions about levels of text representation derived from theories of comprehension, we discovered that rereading improves metacomprehension accuracy. In Experiments 1 and 2, the participants read texts either once or twice, rated their comprehension for each text, and then were tested on the material. In both experiments, correlations between comprehension ratings and test scores were reliably greater for participants who reread texts than for participants who read texts only once. Furthermore, in contrast to the low levels of accuracy typically reported in the literature, rereading produced relatively high levels of accuracy, with the median gamma between ratings and test performance being +.60across participants from both experiments. Our discussion focuses on two alternative hypotheses-that improved accuracy is an artifact of when judgments are collected or that it results from increased reliability of test performance-and on evidence that is inconsistent with these explanations for the rereading effect.Accurately assessing one's text comprehension is instrumental in effectively learning new material. Accordingly, many researchers have investigated the theoretical bases of comprehension assessments, or metacomprehension, with one goal being to discover conditions that produce high levels of metacomprehension accuracy. In most metacomprehension research, participants read several short texts, rate their comprehension for each text, and then complete tests for each. With few exceptions, metacomprehension accuracy has been poor. For instance, Maki (1998b) reported that the mean correlation between ratings and test performance across 25 studies from her lab was only .27. On the basis ofa review ofthe entire literature, Maki (1998b) concluded that "the low accuracy of text predictions may mean that students cannot predict performance well. Alternatively, low accuracy may indicate that our measurement of metacomprehension accuracy is too unreliable for us to detect changes" (p. 142).Given such poor accuracy found in previous research, a question naturally arises: Can metacomprehension accuracy be improved? We provide an affirmative answer to this question by integrating current theory ofmetacognitive monitoring with theory of text comprehension.

Accuracy of metacognitive monitoring affects learning of texts.

“…Moreover, the accuracy of the delayed-keyword group was as high as any other reported in the literature (only Rawson et al, 2000, andWeaver &Bryant, 1995, showed monitoring accuracy near the level of the delayed-keyword group).…”

“…This is not an insignificant methodological difference, given that baseline levels of monitoring accuracy for texts are quite low (Glenberg, Sanocki, Epstein, & Morris, 1987;Maki, 1998) and that most attempts to improve comprehension monitoring have produced less than impressive results (cf. Rawson, Dunlosky, & Thiede, 2000, who achieved relatively high levels of monitoring accuracy by instructing participants to reread texts prior to rating comprehension). For example, Maki and Serra (1992) showed that practice tests had only a modest effect on monitoring accuracy-and only when the practice tests were identical to the eventual tests of comprehension.…”

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

“…One reason to suspect that children may struggle to monitor their own learning in a more complex task, like reading, is that learning these materials may demand more cognitive resources than more simple tasks, which may leave fewer resources for monitoring learning (Rawson, Dunlosky, & Thiede, 2000). This could be particularly important with children, as Roebers, von der Linden, and Howie (2007) showed that cognitive resources play an important role in children's monitoring.…”

Putting the Comprehension in Metacomprehension

“…As Weaver (1990) and others have noted (Rawson, Dunlosky & Thiede, 2000;Weaver, Bryant, & Burns, 1995) In terms of these levels, it is the creation of the situation model that can be seen as the process of deeply understanding a text, or comprehension, and acquiring the information so that it can be used in novel contexts (Kintsch, 1994). While the surface and text-base levels can be seen as memory-based representations of the exact words and ideas that appeared in a text, the situation model represents the instantiation of both explicit and implicit relations between ideas.…”

“…This section presents an analysis of several of the one paragraph passages that have been used in so many studies on metacomprehension, originally introduced by Glenberg and Epstein (1985). The original and revised texts have been used in a large portion of the studies in this literature (Glenberg, Sanocki, Epstein, & Morris, 1987;Lin, Moore & Zabrucky, 2001; Lin, Zabrucky & Moore, 1997; Maki & Serra, 1992a, b;Magliano, Little & Graesser, 1993;Morris, 1990;Rawson, Dunlosky & McDonald, 2002;Rawson, Dunlosky & Thiede, 2000;Weaver, 1990). While to an outsider it is striking that such a large portion of a literature has utilized the same set of texts, it is understandable when investigators were concerned with aligning the effects of new manipulations with previous results.…”