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Highlights • Completing diagrams helps to improve students' monitoring and regulation. • Does drawing diagrams also foster students' monitoring and regulation? • Does viewing these diagrams also improve teachers' monitoring and regulation? • Both completing and drawing diagrams about texts improved students' monitoring. • Viewing students' diagrams improved teachers' regulation. Abstract For regulation of text learning to be effective, students need to accurately monitor their text comprehension. Similarly, to provide adaptive instruction, teachers need to accurately monitor and regulate students' text comprehension. Performing generative activities prior to monitoring has been suggested to provide students with diagnostic cues, improving monitoring accuracy; an open question is whether this would also help teachers. We investigated whether two generative activities, diagram completion and diagram drawing, improved secondary education students' (n = 248) monitoring and regulation accuracy of text comprehension (Experiment 1) and whether viewing students' diagrams improved teachers' (N = 18) monitoring and regulation of students' text comprehension (Experiment 2). Students' monitoring and teachers' regulation accuracy was higher in the diagramming conditions than in the no-diagramming condition. Students and teachers used diagnostic cues when judging students' text comprehension: Improving students' monitoring and teachers' regulation of students' text comprehension relies on improving accessibility of diagnostic cues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children are often overconfident when monitoring their learning, which is harmful for effective control and learning. The current study investigated children’s ( N = 167, age range 7–12 years) judgments of learning (JOLs) when studying difficult concepts. The main aims were (a) to investigate how JOL accuracy is affected by accessibility cues and (b) to investigate developmental changes in implementing accessibility cues in JOLs. After studying different concepts, children were asked to generate novel sentences and then to make JOLs, select concepts for restudy, and take a final test. Overconfidence for incorrect and incomplete test responses was reduced for older children in comparison with younger children. For older age groups, generating a sentence led to greater overconfidence compared with not being able to generate a sentence, which indicates that older children relied more on accessibility cues when making JOLs. This pattern differed in the youngest age group; younger children were generally overconfident regardless of whether they had generated sentences or not. Overconfidence was disadvantageous for effective control of learning for all age groups. These findings imply that instructions to encourage children to avoid metacognitive illusions need to be adapted to children’s developmental stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The ability to monitor understanding of texts, usually referred to as metacomprehension accuracy, is typically quite poor in adult learners; however, recently interventions have been developed to improve accuracy. In two experiments, we evaluated whether generating delayed keywords prior to judging comprehension improved metacomprehension accuracy for children. For sixth and seventh graders, metacomprehension accuracy was greater when generating keywords. By contrast, for fourth graders, metacomprehension accuracy did not differ across conditions. Improved metacomprehension accuracy led to improved regulation of study. The delayed keyword effect in children reported here is discussed in terms of situation model activation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The present study was designed to test the effect of self-explanation and prediction on the development of principled understanding of novices learning to play chess. First-year psychology students, who had no chess experience, first learned the basic rules of chess and were afterwards divided in three conditions. They either observed (control condition), predicted, or predicted and self-explained the moves of the computer playing a chess endgame of King and Rook against King. Finally, in the test phase, participants had to play the endgame against the computer and were required to checkmate the opponent King. Apart from their test performance, the conditions were compared on quality of move predictions in the learning phase. The self-explanation condition showed better understanding of the endgame principles than the two other conditions, as indicated by the move predictions in the learning phase that more often exemplified correct application of chess principles. Moreover, participants in the self-explanation condition more often checkmated the black King in the test phase than participants in the two other conditions. However, no differences emerged between the prediction and observation condition. This study showed that, even for novices, providing self-explanations stimulates the discovery of domain principles of chess. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Children differ in their ability to build referentially coherent discourse representations. Using a visual world paradigm, we investigated how these differences might emerge during the online processing of spoken discourse. We recorded eye movements of 69children (6–11years of age) as they listened to a 7-min story and concurrently viewed a display containing line drawings of the protagonists. Throughout the story, the protagonists were referenced by either a name (e.g., rabbit) or an anaphoric pronoun (e.g., he). Results showed that the probability of on-target fixations increased after children heard a proper name, but not after they heard an anaphoric pronoun. However, differences in the probability of on-target fixation at word onset indicate that the referents of anaphoric pronouns were anticipated by good comprehenders, but less so by poor comprehenders. These findings suggest that comprehension outcomes are related to the online processing of discourse-level cues that regulate the accessibility of entities. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: We tested an embodied account of language proposing that comprehenders create perceptual simulations of the events they hear and read about. In Experiment 1, children (ages 7–13years) performed a picture verification task. Each picture was preceded by a prerecorded spoken sentence describing an entity whose shape or orientation matched or mismatched the depicted object. Responses were faster for matching pictures, suggesting that participants had formed perceptual-like situation models of the sentences. The advantage for matching pictures did not increase with age. Experiment 2 extended these findings to the domain of written language. Participants (ages 7–10years) of high and low word reading ability verified pictures after reading sentences aloud. The results suggest that even when reading is effortful, children construct a perceptual simulation of the described events. We propose that perceptual simulation plays a more central role in developing language comprehension than was previously thought. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• Generative activities (e.g., diagramming) after reading possibly improve monitoring. • We tested if feedback (correct diagram) further improves monitoring and text comprehension. • Participants adapted judgements of learning after receiving a correct diagram. • Diagramming + feedback improved monitoring accuracy and text comprehension. • Standards helped identify mistakes and prepare for the comprehension test. Accurate self-monitoring of text comprehension is critical for effective self-regulated learning from texts. Unfortunately, it has been repeatedly shown that students' monitoring of their text comprehension is often inaccurate, which can subsequently lead to inaccurate regulation and ineffective restudy decisions. Previous research provided evidence that completing causal diagrams at a delay after text reading (i.e., diagramming) can help to improve students' monitoring of text comprehension. However, even after diagramming, there is still substantial room for improvement. The current studies therefore aimed to test whether providing feedback in the form of a correctly completed diagram (i.e., performance standard) would further increase students' monitoring accuracy. In Study 1, 79 participants (aged 18–23) made judgements of learning under four conditions: I. No-Diagram (control), II. Standard-Only, III. Diagramming-Only, or IV. Diagramming + Standard. In each condition, students studied a text, made a judgement of learning before and after the experimental tasks, and completed a comprehension test at the end of each of the (overall six) trials. Results showed that only Diagramming + Standard improved monitoring accuracy and text comprehension. In Study 2, 20 undergraduate students (aged 18–23) completed the Diagramming + Standard condition while their eye movements were tracked and subsequently replayed for cued retrospective verbal reporting. The findings suggest that students used the standards to identify mistakes and improve their monitoring and text comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Adolescence is associated with widespread maturation of brain structures and functional connectivity profiles that shift from local to more distributed and better integrated networks, which are active during a variety of cognitive tasks. Nevertheless, the approach to examine task-induced developmental brain changes is function-specific, leaving the question open whether functional maturation is specific to the particular cognitive demands of the task used, or generalizes across different tasks. In the present study we examine the hypothesis that functional brain maturation is driven by global changes in how the brain handles cognitive demands. Multivariate pattern classification analysis (MVPA) was used to examine whether age discriminative task-induced activation patterns generalize across a wide range of information processing levels. 25 young (13-years old) and 22 old (17-years old) adolescents performed three conceptually different tasks of metacognition, cognition and visual processing. MVPA applied within each task indicated that task-induced brain activation is consistent and reliably different between ages 13 and 17. These age-discriminative activation patterns proved to be common across the different tasks used, despite the differences in cognitive demands and brain structures engaged by each of the three tasks. MVP classifiers trained to detect age-discriminative patterns in brain activation during one task were significantly able to decode age from brain activation maps during execution of other tasks with accuracies between 63 and 75%. The results emphasize that age-specific characteristics of task-induced brain activation have to be understood at the level of brain-wide networks that show maturational changes in their organization and processing efficacy during adolescence. Highlights • MVPA examination of age-related brain activity at 3 levels of information processing. • MVPA revealed consistent task-induced activity differences between ages 13 and 17. • Age-distinctive patterns generalize across metacognitive, cognitive and visual tasks. • Functional brain maturation is driven by global, not function-specific brain changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monitoring of learning is only accurate at some time after learning. It is thought that immediate monitoring is based on working memory, whereas later monitoring requires re-activation of stored items, yielding accurate judgements. Such interpretations are difficult to test because they require reverse inference, which presupposes specificity of brain activity for the hidden cognitive processes. We investigated whether multivariate pattern classification can provide this specificity. We used a word recall task to create single trial examples of immediate and long term retrieval and trained a learning algorithm to discriminate them. Next, participants performed a similar task involving monitoring instead of recall. The recall-trained classifier recognized the retrieval patterns underlying immediate and long term monitoring and classified delayed monitoring examples as long-term retrieval. This result demonstrates the feasibility of decoding cognitive processes, instead of their content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Misconceptions about science are often not corrected during study when they are held with high confidence. However, when corrective feedback co-activates a misconception together with the correct conception, this feedback may surprise the learner and draw attention, especially when the misconceptions are held with high confidence. Therefore, high-confidence misconceptions might be more likely to be corrected than low-confidence misconceptions. The present study investigates whether this hypercorrection effect occurs when students read science texts. Effects of two text formats were compared: Standard texts that presented factual information, and refutation texts that explicitly addressed misconceptions and refuted them before presenting factual information. Eighth grade adolescents ( N  = 114) took a pre-reading test that included 16 common misconceptions about science concepts, rated their confidence in correctness of their response to the pre-reading questions, read 16 texts about the science concepts, and finally took a post-test which included both true/false and open-ended test questions. Analyses of post-test responses show that reading refutation texts causes hypercorrection: Learners more often corrected high-confidence misconceptions after reading refutation texts than after reading standard texts, whereas low-confidence misconceptions did not benefit from reading refutation texts. These outcomes suggest that people are more surprised when they find out a confidently held misconception is incorrect, which may encourage them to pay more attention to the feedback and the refutation. Moreover, correction of high-confidence misconceptions was more apparent on the true/false test responses than on the open-ended test, suggesting that additional interventions may be needed to improve learners' accommodation of the correct information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Students are often overconfident when making Judgements of Learning (JOLs). [•] With language tasks JOL accuracy can be improved by ‘generation instructions’. [•] For problem-solving tasks, completion of worked examples is a generation instruction. [•] Example completion resulted in underestimation of future test performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]