Reading comprehension and metacognition: The importance of inferential skills

Abstract

We explored relations between reading comprehension performance and self-reported components of metacognition in middle-school children. Students’ self-reported metacognitive strategies in planning and evaluation accounted for significant variance in reading comprehension performance on questions involving inferences. In Study 2, middle school students read a science text then made predictions about how they would perform on a comprehension test. Students’ metacomprehension accuracy was related to their performance at different levels of understanding. Students’ text-based question performance accounted for significant variance in metacomprehension accuracy for text-based questions, and inference-based question performance accounted for significant variance in metacomprehension accuracy for inference-based questions. Results from the two studies suggest that metacognitive and metacomprehension knowledge is aligned with the level of information given in text, and is related to deeper understanding of texts, particularly for inferential information. We discuss the implications of these findings and how future research on absolute metacomprehension accuracy should consider different levels of understanding.