'Improving Students' Metacomprehension Accuracy

This chapter considers the former type of test to reflect metamemory for text, whereas the latter is considered to reflect metacomprehension. As suggested by both theory and empirical findings, accurate metamemory and metacomprehension for text are distinct constructs, rely on different types of judgment cues, and can be impacted in opposite ways by a given manipulation. The chapter provides an overview of effective manipulations specifically for improving metacomprehension. In general, students' ability to accurately monitor their own comprehension of text is quite poor. Several reviews reports average levels of metacomprehension accuracy around 0.27 in baseline conditions without special instructions or activities. The chapter stimulates that literature within a theoretical context and discusses relevant methodological concerns. It describes the differences between measures of monitoring accuracy such as relative versus absolute measures. In addition to using a measure of monitoring accuracy that is sensitive to readers' online experiences, monitoring will theoretically be more effective when the cues that readers use as a basis for their judgments are more diagnostic for predicting comprehension. There is now a substantial body of work that has demonstrated the effectiveness of several types of activities in improving relative metacomprehension accuracy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)