Improving school children's metacomprehension

As learners it is important to judge what we have and what we have not understood when either reading or listening. This is referred to as metacomprehension. A typical finding in this field is that our accuracy in monitoring our understanding of a given material (text or oral presentation) is actually quite poor (Dunlosky & Lipko, 2007). From primary school to University students, a poor metacomprehension considerably hampers academic learning, making it hard to regulate their study time, attention level, and cognitive efforts (Thiede & Anderson, 2003). Research has shown that a cue utilisation framework provides an explanation for the source of poor monitoring (Koriat, 1997). Students have a tendency to use invalid "superficial" cues, such as easy lexical recognition or syntactical processing, - because they provide an illusion of comprehension (Glenberg et al., 1982).

Students do not use "deep" cues associated with conceptual processing, such as added inferential and explanatory power, knowledge integration and generalisation (Serra & Metcalfe,2009)

The present project aims to investigate new methods allowing students to reliably assess their own understanding based on diagnostic cues such as feelings of conceptual consistency or explanatory power. We propose to test both school-aged and University students. We will test an idea that inviting students to focus on conceptual consistency rather than other superficial consistency between texts will enhance their metacomprehension, and they will accordingly allocate their study time/choice. 

There is an additional requirement to undertake up to 6 hours undergraduate teaching/week during semesters and to participate in a teaching skills course without further remuneration.