A Metacomprehension Study: the Influence of Monitoring and Control on Text Comprehension

Students may regulate their learning through monitoring and control. One measure of monitoring is relative metacomprehension accuracy. Low relative accuracy may negatively impact control. For example, students may show poor prioritization of material for restudy. Even if learners select appropriate material, they might employ suboptimal study strategies. In either case, students’ academic performance may suffer. I conducted Experiment 1 to test the influence of a situation model intervention (i.e., matching test expectancies) on relative accuracy, text selection, and text comprehension. I expected a serial mediation model to emerge from the data. I conducted Experiment 2 to examine the relationships between relative accuracy, text selection, and comprehension. Study strategy—rereading or self-explaining—was expected to interact with text selection to impact comprehension. I predicted that a conditional process model would emerge from the data. In Experiment 1, I divided participants into either a memory (n = 66) or comprehension (n = 65) test expectancy group. Participants read five texts and provided a monitoring judgment for each text. Then, they selected texts for restudy. Participants indicated the order in which they preferred to study the texts. Later, they completed a pre-test, a restudy phase, and a post-test. Participants were instructed to study/restudy by reading only. I modified this procedure for Experiment 2. All participants expected to take a comprehension test. However, one group (n = 40) was asked to restudy by rereading only. The other group was instructed to restudy by self-explaining the texts (n = 39). The proposed serial mediation and conditional process models were not supported. However, both experiments demonstrated that relative accuracy influences test performance. Additionally, Experiment 1 showed that relative accuracy affects text selection in accordance with a discrepancy reduction model. These findings highlight the need to explore the efficacy of situation model interventions as well as the mechanisms that underlie the relationship between relative accuracy and academic performance. Based on the results, I also encourage educators to frequently prompt students to monitor their understanding of to-be-learned material. Students may benefit from employing multiple situation model interventions while monitoring. Keywords: metacomprehension, relative accuracy, self-regulated learning