Improving metacomprehension accuracy and self-regulation in cognitive skill acquisition: The effect of learner expertise

Abstract

The positive learning effect of metacognitive strategy instructions based on the cue-utilisation framework (Koriat, 1997) has been shown in memorising word pairs and studying expository text. The present study explored the relevance of this framework in cognitive skill acquisition for learners with and without prior domain knowledge. That is, the quality of metacomprehension and self-regulation of novices and more experienced chess players were compared, when learning an endgame of chess. The experienced chess players not only became more skilled at the endgame, but also exemplified higher metacomprehension accuracy and self-regulation than the novices. The absolute level of metacomprehension accuracy and self-regulation of the novices was close to zero. This is the first study that shows an effect of expertise on metacomprehension accuracy in cognitive skill acquisition. Differences between cognitive skill acquisition and text comprehension that might explain differences in quality of metacognitive processes between these domains are discussed.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Nikky van Dorp for her help in collecting the data. This research was supported by a grant from the Erasmus University Trust Fund.

Notes

¹The term used to denote the predictive accuracy of comprehension ratings in learning from text is “metacomprehension accuracy”, whereas the term used in learning word pairs is “monitoring accuracy” (Maki, 1998). In chess, we also prefer the term “metacomprehension accuracy”, since this more clearly emphasises that learners reflect on how well study material is understood.

²This group is the same group as the “JOL forced selection condition” in de Bruin, Rikers, and Schmidt (2005).