Putting the Comprehension in Metacomprehension

Jennifer Wiley, University of Illinois at Chicago
Thomas D. Griffin, Boise State University
Keith Thiede, University of Illinois at Chicago

Article comments

This is a preprint of an article whose final and definitive form has been published in The Journal of General Psychology © 2005 Taylor & Francis; The Journal of General Psychology is available online at: http://www.informaworld.com doi: 10.3200/GENP.132.4.408-428

Abstract

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.