Principal Investigators:
Keith W. Thiede, Educational Psychology, Boise State
Jennifer Wiley, Psychology, UIC
Thomas D. Griffin, Psychology, UIC

Project Contributors:
John Dunlosky, Psychology, Kent State University
Jonathan Brandefour, Boise State, Science & Math Curriculum & Instruction

Overview:
This research program builds on previous work by Griffin, Thiede & Wiley.  Its goal is to empirically test methods of improving learning by improving self-regulation skills that govern studying behavior, and metacomprehension accuracy in particular.

Many models of self-regulated learning describe learning as an interaction between metacognitive monitoring and control -- also called regulation of study (e.g., Nelson & Narens, 1990; Thiede & Dunlosky, 1999; Winne & Butler, 1997).  For instance, consider a student preparing for an upcoming exam.  As the student studies, she monitors her progress toward the goal of mastering the material.  If her monitoring indicates that she has not yet mastered the material, she will likely restudy the material until her monitoring suggests that the material has been mastered, at which time she will stop studying [see Son & Metcalfe (2000) and Thiede & Dunlosky (1999) for situations in which people do not restudy under-learned material (e.g., when under strict time constraints)]. Thus, accurate metacognitive monitoring is critical to effective self-regulation of study behaviors (Thiede, Anderson & Therriault, 2003; Winne & Perry, 2000).  If a person is not able to accurately differentiate well-learned material from less-learned material, he or she could waste time studying material that is already well learned or worse, fail to restudy material that has not yet been adequately learned.  Therefore, it is important to find ways to improve the accuracy of metacognitive monitoring.

Our current work focusses on the improvement of monitoring while learning from text, and is based on prior findings that summarizing a text, or generating keywords can lead to more accurate metacomprehension of expository text, especially when these activities are done at a delay following a first reading.  In work done under a previously funded project, we explored the mechanisms that may be leading to these improvements, and other new ways of improving the accuracy of comprehension monitoring during reading. We demonstrated the effectiveness of 4 specific interventions that led to improved levels of metacomprehension accuracy (yielding correlations between predictive judgements and actual perfomance at around .6 or above).

1. Generating Keywords of Texts after a Delay.
In a series of studies, we found that the delay between reading a text and generating keywords is critical for improving metacomprehension accuracy (and showed that other lags are not important players in the "delayed keyword" effect) (Thiede, Anderson & Therriault, 2003, Thiede, Dunlosky, Griffin & Wiley, 2005).

2. Generating Summaries of Texts after a Delay.
In a similar line of research, we found that when students generate a summary for texts after a delay between reading a text and generating the summary, metacomprehension accuracy is also improved . (Anderson & Thiede, 2008; Thiede & Anderson, 2003; Thiede, Griffin, Wiley & Anderson, in press)

3. Encouraging students to Re-read and Self-explain Texts.
Re-reading can improve metacomprehension accuracy under some conditions, but self-explanation tasks are a more robust intervention (Griffin, Wiley & Thiede, 2008). We are also interested in individual differences and how these may interact with interventions that improve metacomprehension accuracy.  In particular, we have found that both comprehension skill and working memory capacity can be related to metacomprehension accuracy (Griffin, Wiley & Thiede, 2008).  We have also found that topic knowledge can improve the absolute accuracy of comprehension judgments, but showed it does not have the previously hyped negative effects on relative metacomprehension accuracy (Jee, Wiley & Griffin, 2006).

4. Concept Mapping while Reading.
A series of studies with low ability readers has shown that they may have particular difficulty with the delayed/generation interventions that have been effective with typical ability readers.  On the other hand, we have found that teaching students to create concept maps of expository texts improves their metacomprehension accuracy (Thiede, Griffin, Wiley, & Anderson, in press) even among low ability students.

We interpret all of these results with a cue-utilization framework that assumes that readers need access to valid cues in order to accurately judge their own level of comprehension.  In this case, where tests of comprehension are based in the ability to make inferences and draw connections, the valid cues are those that correspond to a situation model-level representation of the text.  We view these interventions as giving readers better access to such cues, either by focussing their attention on the situation model level through explanation or concept mapping tasks, or via delayed tasks that may allow surface cues to fade, and thus situation model cues to become more salient.  As a result, students are better able to accurately predict their comprehension of the text (Thiede, Griffin, Wiley & Redford, in press; Wiley, Thiede, & Griffin, 2007).

Goals of Current Project
In this current grant, we are continuing this theme by exploring how to better teach students what it means to "understand" expository text, and how valid expectations can be instilled via reading and judgment instructions, feedback, and practice tests on different topics. Our first set of results shows some promise for improved metacomprehension accuracy as a result of combinations of clear reading instructions, inference test expectancies, practice test items and self explanation tasks (Wiley, Griffin & Thiede, 2008). We are also extending these interventions into middle school reader samples, as the work until now has investigated effects on college reader samples.

Relevant Publications:

Thiede, K. W., Griffin, T. D., Wiley, J., & Redford, J. (in press) Metacognitive Monitoring During and After Reading. To appear in D. J. Hacker, J. Dunlosky & A. C. Graesser (Eds). Handbook of Metacognition in Education. Routledge.

Thiede, K. W., Griffin, T. D., Wiley, J., & Anderson, M. (in press) Poor Metacomprehension Accuracy as a Result of Inappropriate Cue Use. Discourse Processes.

Wiley, J., & Sanchez, C. A. (in press) Constraints on learning from expository science texts. To appear in N. L. Stein (Ed.) Developmental Science Goes to School.

Wiley, J., Griffin. T. D., & Thiede, K. W. (2008). To understand your understanding you must understand what understanding means. Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.

Ash, I. K. & Wiley, J. (2008) Hindsight Bias in Insight and Mathematical Problem Solving: Evidence of Different Retrospective Reconstruction Mechanisms for Metacognitive vs. Situational Judgments. Memory & Cognition, 36, 822-837.

Griffin, T. D., Wiley, J. & Thiede, K. W. (2008) Individual Differences, Rereading, and Self-Explanation: Concurrent Processing and Cue Validity as Constraints on Metacomprehension Accuracy.  Memory & Cognition, 36, 93-103.

Anderson, M. C. M. & Thiede, K. W. (2008) Why do delayed summaries improve metacomprehension accuracy?  Acta Psychologica, 128, 110-118.

Wiley, J., Thiede, K. W. & Griffin, T. D. (2007). What does it mean to learn from and understand science text? Paper presented at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL.

Graesser, A. C., Wiley, J., Goldman, S. R., O’Reilly, T.,  Jeon, M. & McDaniel, B. (2007). SEEK Web Tutor: Fostering a Critical Stance While Exploring the Causes of Volcanic Eruption. Metacognition and Learning, 2, 89-105.

Jee, B., Wiley, J. & Griffin, T. D. (2006). Expertise and the illusion of comprehension.  Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Cogntive Science Society.

Thiede, K. W., Dunlosky, J., Griffin, T. D., & Wiley, J. (2005). Understanding the Delayed-Keyword Effect on Metacomprehension Accuracy.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31, 1267-1280.

Wiley, J., Griffin, T. D., & Thiede, K. W. (2005). Putting the comprehension in metacomprehension.  Journal of General Psychology, 132, 408-428.

Dunlosky, J. D., Hertzog, C., Kennedy, M. R. F. & Thiede, K. W. (2005). The Self-Monitoring Approach For Effective Learning. International Journal of Cognitive Technology, 10, 4-11.

Dunlosky, J. & Thiede, K. W. (2004). Causes and constraints of the shift-to-easier-materials effect in the control of study. Memory & Cognition, 32, 779-788.

Thiede, K. W. & Anderson, M. C. M. (2003). Summarizing can improve metacomprehension accuracy. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 28, 129-160.

Thiede, K. W; Anderson, M. C. M., &  Therriault, D. (2003). Accuracy of metacognitive monitoring affects learning of texts. Journal of Educational Psychology, 95, 66-73.

Rawson, K. A., Dunlosky, J., &  Thiede, K. W. (2000). The rereading effect: Metacomprehension accuracy improves across reading trials.Memory & Cognition, 28, 1004-1010.

This research is funded by Grant R305B070460 to Thomas D. Griffin, Keith W. Thiede and Jennifer Wiley from the Cognition and Student Learning Program of the Institute of Education Sciences.