Metacomprehension: A brief history and how to improve its accuracy

ABSTRACT—People’s judgments about how well they have learned and comprehended text materials can be impor-tant for effectively regulating learning, but only if those judgments are accurate. Over two decades of research examining judgments of text learning—or metacompre-hension—has consistently demonstrated that people’s judgment accuracy is quite poor. We review recent re-search that has shown some success in improving judgment accuracy and then argue that the most common method used to investigate metacomprehension accuracy may in-advertently constrain it. We describe a new method that sidesteps some problems of the older method and present evidence showing how people can achieve high levels of metacomprehension accuracy. KEYWORDS—metacomprehension; judgmentaccuracy;meta