Metacomprehension judgements reflect the belief that diagrams improve learning from text

Abstract

In two experiments we systematically explored whether people consider the format of text materials when judging their text learning, and whether doing so might inappropriately bias their judgements. Participants studied either text with diagrams (multimedia) or text alone and made both per-paragraph judgements and global judgements of their text learning. In Experiment 1 they judged their learning to be better for text with diagrams than for text alone. In that study, however, test performance was greater for multimedia, so the judgements may reflect either a belief in the power of multimedia or on-line processing. Experiment 2 replicated this finding and also included a third group that read texts with pictures that did not improve text performance. Judgements made by this group were just as high as those made by participants who received the effective multimedia format. These results confirm the hypothesis that people's metacomprehension judgements can be influenced by their beliefs about text format. Over-reliance on this multimedia heuristic, however, might reduce judgement accuracy in situations where it is invalid.

Keywords:

• Multimedia learning
• Metacomprehension
• Diagrams
• Metacognition
• Heuristics

Acknowledgements

Experiment 1 was part of MJS's dissertation. We thank Katherine Rawson, William Merriman, Joel Hughes, Christopher Was, and Raymond Craig for serving on the dissertation committee, and for their helpful comments and suggestions regarding this research.

Notes

¹For interested readers, we calculated the relative accuracy of the per-paragraph judgements for the two groups (i.e., within-participants gamma correlations between judgements and test performance across paragraphs). Relative accuracy did not differ across groups in either Experiment 1 or 2 (Table B1 of Appendix B), so we do not discuss this measure further.

²Cuevas et al. (2002) examined between-participant correlations across participants, which tap a different aspect of judgement accuracy than do measures of within-participant relative accuracy that we reported in Table B1 (for a comparison of these measures, see Dunlosky & Hertzog, 2000). When we computed the between-participant correlations in our study as in Cuevas et al., they were statistically equivalent for multimedia materials versus for text alone. Thus the multimedia effects on this measure of accuracy reported by Cuevas et al. (2002) may not be highly robust or may be moderated by other factors, such as verbal ability (which we did not measure) or any other number of differences in methods between their experiment and the present ones. Given that this form of judgement accuracy was not vital to our present aims, we leave exploration of this inconsistency for future research.