Elementary School Experience with Comprehension Testing May Influence Metacomprehension Accuracy Among Seventh and Eighth Graders

We explored whether exposure to different kinds of comprehension tests during elementary years influenced metacomprehension accuracy among 7 th and 8 th graders. This research was conducted in a kindergarten through eighth grade charter school with an expeditionary learning curriculum. In literacy instruction, teachers emphasize reading for meaning and inference building, and they regularly assess deep comprehension with summarization, discussion, dialogic reasoning and prediction activities throughout the elementary years. The school recently expanded, doubling enrollments in 7 th and 8 th grades. Thus, approximately half of the students had long-term exposure to the curriculum and the other half did not. In Study 1, metacomprehension accuracy using the standard relative accuracy paradigm was significantly better for long-time students than for newcomers. In Study 2, all students engaged in delayedkeyword generation before judging their comprehension of texts. Metacomprehension accuracy was again significantly better for long-time students than for newcomers. Further, the superior monitoring accuracy led to more effective regulation of study, as seen in better decisions about which texts to restudy, that led, in turn, better comprehension. The results suggest the importance of early exposure to comprehension tests for developing skills in comprehension monitoring and self-regulated learning. Models of self-regulated learning describe learning as an interplay between metacognitive monitoring and regulation of study (e.g., Ariel, Dunlosky & Bailey, 2009; Butler & Winne, 1995; Griffin, Wiley & Salas, in press; Metcalfe, 2002; Nelson & Narens, 1990; Thiede & Dunlosky, 1999; Winne & Hadwin, 1998). For instance, as a person studies, he or she monitors his or her learning and uses this to guide subsequent study. If monitoring indicates that material has been adequately learned, he or she will stop studying. If monitoring indicates the material has not been adequately learned, he or she will continue to study. Thus, accurate monitoring is crucial for effective regulation of study (Winne & Perry, 2000). If a person does not accurately differentiate well-learned material from less-learned material, he or she could waste time studying material that is already well-learned or, even worse, fail to restudy material that has not yet been adequately understood. Empirical support for the aforementioned models has largely been correlational. Metacognitive monitoring has been shown to be related to regulation of study. For example, the selections of items for restudy has been shown to be related to judgments of learning (e.g., Dunlosky & Thiede, 2004; Mazzoni & Cornoldi, 1993; Mazzoni, Cornoldi, & Marchitelli, 1990; Metcalfe, 2009; Nelson & Leonesio, 1988; Thiede & Anderson, 2003). Regulation of study has also been shown to be related to test performance. That is, decisions about which items to restudy influence subsequent test performance, both when regulatory decisions are made by the experimenter (e.g., Atkinson, 1972; Nelson, Dunlosky, Graf, & Narens, 1994) and when they are made by participants (Thiede, 1999). To date, Thiede, Anderson, and Therriault (2003) have reported the only experimental study showing that better monitoring accuracy produces more effective regulation of study, which, in turn, leads to increased learning. In this study, college students engaged in the standard relative accuracy paradigm (Maki, 1998) in which they read a set of texts and then judged their comprehension of each text. Further, prior to judging their comprehension some students generated a list of five keywords that captured the essence of the text. Some generated keywords immediately after reading (the immediate-keyword group), some generated keywords after a delay from reading (the delayed-keyword group), and others did not generate keywords (the no-keyword group). After making judgments, all students took tests on each of the topics. Then they had the opportunity to select texts for restudy, and took a final set of tests.