Effects Of Summarizing And Self-Questioning On Metacomprehension Accuracy

A key to effective text comprehension is the ability to judge whether information presented in the text has been understood.Therefore,a critical component of reading is comprehension monitoring.A frequently-used method to measure one's ability to monitor comprehension is for a reader to read a text,rate his or her comprehension of the text,and then take a test over the reading material.Monitoring accuracy within this paradigm has been operationalized as the correlation between the reader's comprehension ratings and performance on the comprehension test,known as metacomprehension accuracy.Considering the importance of this relationship between monitoring accuracy and test performance,it is critical to discover ways to improve accuracy.In this study,summarization and self-question were investigated to assess their contribution to improving metacomprehension accuracy.And we focused on differences in metacomprehension accuracy between inference tests (designed to assess knowledge of a person's situation model) and detail tests (designed to assess text-based knowledge).The whole study consists of two experiments.The first experiment adopted a 3 x2 cross-factorial design.The first factor was treatment with three levels(no summary, immediate summary,and delayed summary).The second factor was type of test question with two levels(inference tests and detail tests).One goal of this study was to verify effects of summarization on metacomprehension accuracy.And we tried to explore differences in metacomprehension accuracy between the two types of test question when summaries are written immediately after reading a text and after a delay.Another experiment also adopted a 3×2 cross-factorial design.The first factor was treatment with three levels(no questioning,unguided questioning,guided questioning).The second factor was type of test question with two levels(inference tests and detail tests).The goal of this study was to explore effects of self-question on metacomprehension accuracy and differences in metacomprehension accuracy between the two types of test question by different question interventions.The results showed: (1) Summarization and self-questiong improved the monitoring of reading comprehension.(2) Metacomprehension accuracy on detail tests was dramatically greater for the group of students that wrote summaries immediately after reading a text than for the control group,(3) Metacomprehension accuracy on inference tests was dramatically greater for the group of students that wrote summaries after a delay than for the control group or the group of students that wrote summaries immediately after reading a text.(4) The unguided questioning group improved metacomprehension accuracy on detail tests,(5) Yhe guided questioning group improved metacomprenhension accuracy on inference tests.These findings demonstrated that students experienced difficulties in reading comprehension and monitoring comprehension without the use of reading strategies.Therefore, it was very necessary to provide students with concrete strategies in approaching reading tasks.