Summarizing can improve metacomprehension accuracy

Abstract

In two experiments, it was examined whether the accuracy of comprehension monitoring (metacomprehension accuracy) was improved by summarizing texts. College students read texts and then some wrote a summary of each text (either immediately after reading or after a delay—the delay between reading and summarizing was filled by the reading of the remaining texts), whereas others did not (the control group). All the students then rated their comprehension of each text. Finally, they completed a test of the material covered in each text. In both experiments, metacomprehension accuracy, operationalized as the correlation between ratings of comprehension and subsequent test performance, 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. These findings are described in the context of a discrepancy-reduction model of self-regulated study.