Self-monitoring in poor and good reading comprehenders and their use of strategy

The present research examines the ability of 6th- and 7th-grade poor and good comprehenders to monitor their comprehension during reading and also examines their consequent activation of strategies. In particular, we considered the process of search through the text, that is moving up and down the text in order to find relevant information to respond to subsequent questions. In order to study this process, good and poor comprehenders were invited to read a descriptive passage and to respond to questions, some of which were embedded in the text and some of which were at the end of the text. Half of the participants in each group were also required to give a confidence rating of their response accuracy. Both groups benefited from the embedded questions, thus revealing that a specific search process affects the difficulty in responding to questions. Further, poor comprehenders were able to monitor their accuracy (i.e. know how well they understand). Finally the monitoring requirement did not have a positive influence on comprehension. A second experiment tested whether the poorer performance of poor comprehenders for the questions at the end of the text was due to an inability to search through the text in order to find the required information or to a deficit in strategy utilization. When explicitly invited to search through the text, poor comprehenders were able to search and improve their performance, suggesting that their failure with the final questions in Expt 1 was at least partially due to a deficit in strategy utilization.