For decades, research on metacomprehension has demonstrated that many learners struggle to accurately discriminate their comprehension of texts. However, while reviews of experimental studies on relative metacomprehension accuracy have found average intra-individual correlations between predictions and performance of around.27 for adult readers, in some contexts even lower near-zero accuracy levels have been reported. One possible explanation for those strikingly low levels of accuracy is the high conceptual overlap between topics of the texts. To test this hypothesis, in the present work participants were randomly assigned to read one of two text sets that differed in their degree of conceptual overlap. Participants judged their understanding and completed an inference test for each topic. Across two studies, mean relative accuracy was found to match typical baseline levels for the low-overlap text sets and was significantly lower for the high-overlap text sets. Results suggest text similarity is an important factor impacting comprehension monitoring accuracy that may have contributed to the variable and sometimes inconsistent results reported in the metacomprehension literature. © The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2023.

What factors influence predictions of creative performance? Prior work indicates that images can skew predictions in the contexts of learning, memory, and decision making, but little work has devoted attention to the metacognitive effects of images in creative thinking. Metacognitive frameworks indicate that people often base predictions of performance on the subjective ease with which related information comes to mind. The present experiments tested whether the presence of object photographs in the alternate uses task (AUT) inflates predictions of creativity. In Experiments 1-4, participants made ratings about their predictions of creative performance for various objects in the AUT either with or without photographs of the object. Participants provided higher ratings and were faster to make ratings in the image than no-image condition. In Experiment 5, participants actually attempted to generate creative uses for the objects, half of which were accompanied by object photographs. Creativity scores for these responses were lower in the image condition than no-image condition, but participants' retrospective judgments indicated the opposite. These results provide a novel extension of metacognitive work showing that images inflate predictions of performance and fit with prior research showing that images can limit creativity.

Three experiments used a paradigm based on Retrieval-Induced Forgetting research to test for the competition from non-useful sources of information in cross-domain analogical transfer. This was accomplished by presenting people with texts introducing multiple candidate solutions prior to attempting the Radiation problem, and later testing memory for the texts. In Experiment 1, viable and unviable candidate solutions that varied in surface and structural similarity were presented in their own story contexts. In Experiments 2 and 3, the viable and unviable solutions were embedded within the same story context. The results suggest that forgetting unviable solutions that share surface-level overlap with the target problem may be less important than suggested by prior work. Instead, greater evidence of forgetting was obtained when unviable solutions were embedded within the same context as viable solutions. These findings suggest that competition from superficially similar, unviable solutions may not be the main obstacle during analogical problem-solving attempts, but rather the main obstacle for transfer may be the selection of relevant solution concepts.

Creative idea generation involves search and retrieval of memory. There is a default tendency to rely too heavily on familiar or easily accessible information during idea generation, especially in tasks such as the alternate uses task (AUT) that involve generating novel uses for common objects. Knowing which obvious ideas to avoid may be important in creating more original ideas. The present experiments tested whether instructions encouraging participants to avoid a set of common example ideas would enhance originality or cause fixation on the AUT. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrated that presenting a verbal list of common example uses along with a warning to avoid those uses enhanced originality. In contrast, when the example ideas were presented in the absence of any “avoid” instructions, there was no benefit on originality, indicating that mere example exposure did not stimulate more creative idea generation. The design of Experiment 2 was parallel to that of Experiment 1, but the verbal examples were replaced with visually depicted examples. Exposure to the visual examples led to reduced originality, suggesting fixation. Although the “avoid” instruction helped to mitigate this fixation, it did not enhance originality beyond the no-example condition. The results suggest that under some conditions presenting unoriginal examples along with an “avoid” warning can allow people to shift their focus away from easily retrieved ideas and toward more novel approaches. The results are also consistent with prior work showing a negative impact of visual presentation of examples on creativity. © 2020, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.

Many studies have demonstrated that illustrating expository science texts with images that are interesting, but irrelevant for understanding the causal relations underlying scientific phenomena, can cause seduction effects, which can reduce understanding from text. The term seduction effects refers to the influence that images are thought to have on readers, seducing them away from deeply processing important information. The present study explores whether images relevant for instructional goals may also show some seduction effects. In this study, the presence of photographic images negatively impacted understanding compared with the presence of relevant animations or instructing students to sketch a drawing during reading. However, the results showed that both photographic images and relevant animations could lead to illusions of understanding, whereas sketching did not. The results suggest that even images that are relevant for instructional goals may sometimes result in seduction effects that deceive readers when judging their own understanding.

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)

The main goal of the present research was to test whether the presence of analogies would affect the relative accuracy of metacognitive judgments about learning from expository science texts, and whether any effect would depend on the type of cues that readers used as the basis for their judgments of comprehension. In a series of experiments, students read texts that either contained or did not contain analogies; were asked to judge how well they understood each text; took comprehension tests for each topic; and were asked to self-report the basis for their judgments. Relative metacomprehension accuracy was computed as the intra-individual correlation between judgments and test performance. Results showed that the presence of analogies can lead to poor relative metacomprehension accuracy for students who fail to use situation-model-based cues to judge their understanding of text.

Starting with early research on multiple source comprehension that primarily emerged from work in history, researchers have explored several types of instructional manipulations including altering the features of the inquiry task that is given (such as being asked to write a narrative or an argument); changing features of the task environment (such as the format of the source documents or features of the document set); and varying the instructional context (such as having students engage in a particular activity or training prior to engaging in a multiple-source inquiry task). These three broad categories continue to represent the main types of manipulations that have been studied as this literature has expanded to also include explorations into the comprehension of scientific phenomena from multiple-source inquiry tasks. This chapter provides an overview discussing the kinds of processes that are theoretically involved in multiple-source comprehension; articulates the challenges that readers face when they attempt to engage in multiple-source inquiry tasks; and summarizes the empirical research that has attempted to explore multiple source comprehension processes using manipulations of the inquiry task, the task environment, and the instructional context. [This paper was published in: J. L. G. Braasch, I. Bråten, & M. T. McCrudden (Eds.) "Handbook of Multiple Source Use" (p341-361). New York, NY: Routledge.]

This article describes several approaches to assessing student understanding using written explanations that students generate as part of a multiple-document inquiry activity on a scientific topic (global warming). The current work attempts to capture the causal structure of student explanations as a way to detect the quality of the students' mental models and understanding of the topic by combining approaches from Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, and applying them to Education. First, several attributes of the explanations are explored by hand coding and leveraging existing technologies (LSA and Coh-Metrix). Then, we describe an approach for inferring the quality of the explanations using a novel, two-phase machine-learning approach for detecting causal relations and the causal chains that are present within student essays. The results demonstrate the benefits of using a machine-learning approach for detecting content, but also highlight the promise of hybrid methods that combine ML, LSA and Coh-Metrix approaches for detecting student understanding. Opportunities to use automated approaches as part of Intelligent Tutoring Systems that provide feedback toward improving student explanations and understanding are discussed.

Graphics presented alongside expository science texts can have a number of positive effects for instruction, including facilitating engagement, arousing interest, and improving understanding. However, because students harbor expectations about which contexts are likely to support better understanding, the mere presence of graphics also has the potential to lead to inaccurate judgments of understanding when those graphics do not actually lead to presumed levels of performance. Previous work has demonstrated that including graphics alongside text can alter the judgment process. The present work explores different categories of instructional graphics found in biology textbooks and tests how different graphic types, classified by their form and function, can affect expectations of understanding prior to actual reading. Experiment 1 found that realistic, depictive graphics predominated in a middle school text, whereas more abstract and explanatory graphics predominated in a college text. Experiment 2 demonstrated that different categories of graphics led to differences in expectations of how helpful graphics would be for understanding.