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 a nd good comprehenders to monitor their comprehension during reading an d also examines their consequent activation of strategies. In particul ar, we considered the process of search through the text, that is movi ng up and down the text in order to find relevant information to respo nd to subsequent questions. In order to study this process, good and p oor comprehenders were invited to read a descriptive passage and to re spond to questions, some of which were embedded in the text and some o f which were at the end of the text. Half of the participants in each group were also required to give a confidence racing of their response accuracy. Both groups benefited from the embedded questions, thus rev ealing chat a specific search process affects the difficulty in respon ding to questions. Further, poor comprehenders were able to monitor th eir accuracy (i.e, know how well they understand). Finally the monitor ing requirement did not have a positive influence on comprehension. A second experiment tested whether the poorer performance of poor compre henders for the questions at the end of the text was due to an inabili ty to search through the text in order to find the required informatio n or to a deficit in strategy utilization. When explicitly invited to search through the text, poor comprehenders were able to search and im prove their performance, suggesting that their failure with the final questions in Expt 1 was at least partially due to a deficit in strateg y utilization.