ISSN 0439-755X
CN 11-1911/B

›› 2009, Vol. 41 ›› Issue (08): 676-683.

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Metacomprehension Monitoring and Regulation in Reading Comprehension

CHEN Qi-Shan   

  1. Center for Studies of Psychological Application, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China
  • Received:2008-03-03 Revised:1900-01-01 Published:2009-08-30 Online:2009-08-30
  • Contact: CHEN Qi-Shan

Abstract: Metacomprehension monitoring and regulation are central to self-regulated comprehension. Metacompre-hension monitoring, which refers to the process of monitoring learning from text, is important for goal setting, planning and the regulation of reading strategies in reading comprehension. Lots of researches have been con-ducted to investigate whether metacognitive judgments are, indeed, accurate. In paired-associate learning, mon-itoring accuracy can be improved in a variety of ways. However, monitoring accuracy is far less impressive when the task involves reading written texts; the mean Gamma correlation is quite low. One of the purposes in this study is to investigate how to improve the accuracy of monitoring and whether or not that metacomprehen-sion accuracy is higher for delayed-keyword group than for immediate-keyword group and no-keyword group. One of the key issues in the study of metacognition is how people use metacognitive judgments to adjust, strategize, and maximize learning, so it is important to find out that which factors can enhance the accuracy of metacomprehension monitoring and whether accurate monitoring can provide a basis for making decisions about what to restudy or how long to study. The most important issue in this study is to investigate whether superior accuracy could lead to more effective regulation of study (i.e., participants choose to reread less learned texts over better learned texts to a greater degree), and whether this could produce greater test performance.
59 college students participated in this experiment. The participants were divided into 3 groups, delayed keyword group, immediate keyword group, and no keyword group. The materials were six expository texts (from 987 to 1180 Chinese characters). Each text was followed by 12 questions (6 detail questions and 6 infer-ence questions). Participants all read the six texts on a computer LCD monitor. Then they rated comprehension on a 1~7 scale and took a comprehension test on each text after generate keywords. All the participants were asked to select some texts for restudy, and again tested on each text. Half of these questions were the same as those given on test 1, and the others questions were new.
The result showed that metacomprehension accuracy, which was operationalized as the Gamma correlation between a person’s judgment ratings and his or her criterion test performance, was higher when students wrote keywords after a delay than immediate wrote keywords and did not write keywords. The participants in the de-layed keyword group were more likely to select less learned texts over better-learned texts to reread than in the immediate keyword group, and no keyword group. The importance of monitoring accuracy to control and their impacts on test were also analyzed by comparing test performance among three groups cross two texts and test2 performance for texts that were selected versus that were not selected for rereading. A substantial increase in performance across two test trials for the delayed-keyword group was found. By contrast, performance was de-creased for the others groups.
These results are important because they showed not only accurate monitoring was achievable, but also accurate monitoring may improve test performance via effective regulation (i.e., chose the right texts for re-study). Given our results, it seems reasonable to conclude that metacomprehension monitoring affects meta-comprehension control, in turn, affects the text comprehension.

Key words: metacomprehension monitoring, accuracy, metacomprehension regulate, effect