Metacognitive Skills and the Role of Text-Marking in Reading Comprehension
Date
2022-06-06
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Abstract
Text-marking is a popular reading strategy among students, but there has been much debate
in empirical literature on its effectiveness. The current study examined the relationship between
readers’ metacognitive skills and the quality of their text-marking, as well as the impact of text-marking
on reading time, question answering time and comprehension accuracy. Specifically, we
asked if the effect of text-marking relied on the physical act of marking or seeing the marks in text.
90 undergraduate students were separated into three groups and completed a reading task with six
passages. One group was provided with a highlighter and could access their highlighted text when
answering questions, one group could highlight but answered questions with a clean text, and the
other group did not use highlighting. Readers who were provided with a highlighter spent
significantly more time reading the text, regardless of how many words they actually highlighted,
but this increase in reading time did not translate into any benefits when answering questions.
Additionally, contrary to our hypothesis, readers with higher metacognitive skills highlighted more
words and less central words. We recommended that students should use text-marking with caution
and instructors should inform students of the cognitive processes involved in text-marking.
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Keywords
Reading Comprehension, Metacognition