Exploring the Meta-Comprehension Abilities of Students with Intellectual Disabilities

The purpose of this investigation was to explore the importance of different meta-comprehension aspects in students with intellectual disabilities, and to determine which one of them can best explain their performance on reading comprehension. For this purpose, metacognitive measurement instruments, an inconsistency detection tasks, and confidence in performance judgments on reading performance were applied together with a reading comprehension standardized test (LECTUM). By means of regression analyses of the data, results revealed that the detection of inconsistencies as a meta-comprehension monitoring measure, more specifically the detection of internal inconsistencies, some dimensions of the meta-comprehension inventory as a measure of metacognitive skills (planning, evaluation of the reading process, regulation of comprehension/incomprehension) and absolute calibration accuracy were the best predictors of performance of the participants on reading comprehension. It is of importance to understand the nature of the problems presented by the students when facing a text in order to develop adequate approaches to reading comprehension according to the needs of learners with intellectual disabilities. According to the results, we concluded that theoretically-relevant metacognitive elements significantly predicted the performance of reading comprehension. Implications for learning and instruction are discussed.