Metacomprehension in Multiple Document Reading: Can Judgment Accuracy Be Fostered by Generating Twitter-Like Summaries?

Abstract

Accurately assessing someone's comprehension is central to learning from multiple documents. This study examines whether judgment accuracy can be increased if readers summarize texts before assessing their own comprehension. We asked 144 adults to read multiple documents on a historical controversy. They then produced Twitter-like summaries either (a) after a time delay or (b) immediately after reading; a control group (c) did not write summaries. Results showed that delaying writing summaries increased the absolute accuracy of self-assessments of undisputed historical content knowledge. We found negative effects for the accuracy of self-assessments of source- content links, intertextual conflicts, and integration performance in an essay. The relative accuracy was lower in the delayed summaries group than in the controls. In summary, the positive effect of writing summaries appears to be limited to the self-assessment of content knowledge, whereas it is reduced with respect to forms of knowledge specific to reading multiple texts.