The rereading effect: Metacomprehension accuracy improves across reading trials

Guided by a hypothesis that integrates principles of monitoring from a cue- based framework of meta-cognitive judgments with assumptions about levels o f text representation derived from theories of comprehension, we discovered that rereading improves metacomprehension accuracy. In Experiments 1 and 2 , the participants read texts either once or twice, rated their comprehensi on for each text, and then were tested on the material. In both experiments , correlations between comprehension ratings and test scores were reliably greater for participants who reread texts than for participants who read te xts only once. Furthermore, in contrast to the low levels of accuracy typic ally reported in the literature, rereading produced relatively high levels of accuracy, with the median gamma between ratings and test performance bei ng +.60 across participants from both experiments. Our discussion focuses o n two alternative hypotheses-that improved accuracy is an artifact of when judgments are collected or that it results from increased reliability of te st performance-and on evidence that is inconsistent with these explanations for the rereading effect.