Putting the Comprehension in Metacomprehension

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 a number of important factors in text comprehension have been largely ignored in research on monitoring understanding of text. Thus, this paper explores some methodological and conceptual issues, inspired by current theories of text comprehension, which suggest that the nature of the texts and tests used for metacomprehension studies may be critical factors to consider.