Refutation texts compensate for detrimental effects of misconceptions on comprehension and metacomprehension accuracy and support transfer.

Misconceptions impair not only learners’ comprehension of a text but also the accuracy with which they judge their comprehension, that is, metacomprehension accuracy. Refutation texts are beneficial to elicit conceptual-change processes and thus to overcome the detrimental impact of misconceptions on comprehension. However, it is unclear whether refutation texts and the conceptual-change processes induced by reading them benefit metacomprehension accuracy in addition to comprehension and how robust these effects are when reading further texts. We conducted an experiment in which we asked 80 student teachers with a varying number of statistical misconceptions to read either a standard or a refutation text on statistics and assessed their comprehension and metacomprehension. In a subsample, we examined the students’ conceptual-change processes during reading with the think-aloud methodology. Subsequently, we asked the students to read a research report that required the application of the previously acquired statistical knowledge and assessed their comprehension and metacomprehension again. The results revealed that the refutation text compensated for the detrimental impact of misconceptions on comprehension and metacomprehension accuracy. The think-aloud data indicated that when reading the refutation text, students with more misconceptions engaged in conceptual-change processes more actively, which in turn supported their comprehension and metacomprehension accuracy. Comp...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research