Abstract:

A basic assumption in current educational and psychological research is that students’ metacognitive skills facilitate self-regulated learning and are related in the long run to improved performance. Engaged, self-regulated readers are those who set realistic goals, select effective reading strategies, monitor their understanding of the text, evaluate the task solution, and reflect on their cognitive outcomes, in other words, they act metacognitively to a large extent using actively their own skills to build understanding. This study is concerned with assessing elementary students’ metacognitive skills during reading comprehension and with identifying factors associated to the actual employment of such skills. Participants of this study were selected from an initial sample of 127 third grade students. The initial pool of 127 students was administered the Reading Comprehension Test for third-graders developed by the authors. From this pool, 17 students with the lowest and 17 students with the highest performance in the Reading Comprehension Test were selected to be further examined. These 34 students were individually administered a second reading comprehension test developed for the requirements of the present study. This test consisted of a 545 words passage entitled “The stolen treasure: A mystery story” and the student had to answer the 11 reading comprehension tasks. Each student’s efforts to solve the reading comprehension tasks were video-recorded. In the present study, students’ metacognitive activity has being recorded with reference to 3 selected reading comprehension tasks: finding the main idea of the passage, mapping out the itinerary followed by the basic hero, and finding out the time-table of the bus and ships services used by the hero. The metacognitive skills examined were planning, self-monitoring, error detection and evaluation of the solution. Qualitative and quantitative dimensions of students’ metacognitive strategic behavior have been assessed. In the present study, students’ overt problem solving behaviours were recorded by two independent observers as external indicators of metacognitive skills and tactics that students employ to perform and regulate the reading comprehension process. The observers filled in the Strategic Behaviour Observation Scale (SBOS) for each student based on video-recordings. In general, the criteria for scoring were based on the frequency of employing the examined metacognitive skills but also on the behaviours’ qualitative description. Moreover, the overall time spent by each student on metacognitive activities during dealing with the reading comprehension tasks was also calculated. Data analyses are still in progress. Preliminary analyses showed that high achievers in reading comprehension were rated to act metacognitively more frequently than low achievers in reading comprehension. Other factors that seem to be associated to students’ actual metacognitive activity are the type of the task at hand, the method of assessing metacognitive skills, and the type of metacognitive skill assessed. Results are discussed within the frame of metacognition in learning and of the self-regulated learning tradition.

Keywords:

metacognitive skills, reading comprehension, self-regulation.