ABSTRACT
An important aspect of learning in educational settings is deciding when studied material is known. Students must constantly make decisions about their learning of material to decide whether to continue to study the material, to return later to study, or to cease studying because the material is known adequately. I refer to the process of monitoring learning from text as metacomprehension (Maki & Berry, 1984). Although metacomprehension is an integral part of education, research on the ability to do this type of monitoring has been fairly recent and sparse. Some of the earliest research on this ability was conducted with children using a comprehension moni toring paradigm (e.g., Markman, 1977) in which children heard text that was missing information, and the investigators noted whether or not the children indicated that they did not understand. Generally, the research showed that children often did not spontaneously report inadequacies in the text, but when direct questions were asked, they showed some under standing that texts were internally inconsistent or inconsistent with general knowledge (see Anderson & Beal, 1995, for a recent report). Although it may be thought that the failure to report inconsistencies in text is confined to immature readers, adult readers are also quite poor at detecting incon sistencies in text (e.g., Glenberg, Wilkinson, & Epstein, 1982).
