Individual Differences in Comprehension Monitoring Ability during Reading

The goal of this experiment was to investigate readers’ ability to monitor their processing difficulty during reading and individual differences in this ability. Participants read a text one sentence at a time and made judgments of learning, judgments of sentence difficulty, or made no judgment. Participants’ metacognitive judgments were correlated with their processing difficulty only for high skilled readers. In addition, attending to different metacognitive judgments did not increase accuracy on comprehension questions compared to a read only group. The results suggest that comprehension monitoring is a skilled process, but may not be sufficient for skilled comprehension.