Scaffolding self-regulated learning from causal-relations texts: Diagramming and self-assessment to improve metacomprehension accuracy?

AbstractThe accuracy of students’ relative comprehension judgments when reading texts is typically rather low. This has been ascribed to students grounding their comprehension judgments on cues that are not diagnostic of their actual comprehension level. Asking students to complete causal diagrams—a diagramming scaffold—before judging comprehension has proved effective in providing them with more diagnostic cues and thereby fostered metacomprehension accuracy and self-regulated learning. However, there is still room for improvement. We investigated experimentally whether adding the instruction to students to self-assess their causal diagrams: (1) would lead to more accurate judgments than c…