engleski

Metacognitive knowledge, summarization skill and text comprehension in early adolescence: A longitudinal study

Although the importance of metacognitive knowledge and summarization skill for the text comprehension has been extensively explored, there are only few studies that longitudinally follow metacognitive development during early adolescence, which is a crucial period for the improvement of metacognition in reading. The aim of the current study was to examine whether groups of students with specific patterns of summarization skill, metacognitive knowledge of reading strategies and text comprehension, obtained by means of cluster analysis in the 4th grade, still differ in those skills in the 6th and 8th grade. We also wanted to explore the stability of obtained cluster structure and the changes in the group memberships from the 4th to the 8th grade. Metacognitive knowledge was assessed by 14-multiple choice questions asking students to select appropriate reading strategy in given situation. In summarization task students were asked to summarize main ideas from expository passages. Text comprehension was assessed on one narrative and one expository text. By k-means cluster analysis the four groups were differentiated in the 4th grade, when students were 10 years old. The group of the good comprehenders had above average metacognitive knowledge and summarization skill. Poor comprehenders had below average metacognitive knowledge and summarization skill. Two groups of average comprehenders differed in the metacognitive tasks. One group had above average metacognitive knowledge but below average summarization skill, whereas the opposite pattern occurred in the second group. The results showed that the differences in metacognition and text comprehension obtained between the groups in the 4th grade were not as prominent in the 6th and 8th grade. There were no differences in any of assessed variables between good and average comprehenders in the second and third wave of measurement. However, initially poor comprehenders still had the lowest comprehension scores than the other groups, and they still differed in metacognition from the good comprehenders. All the groups improved their metacognitive knowledge from 4th to 6th but not from 6th to 8th grade. The analysis of the cluster membership showed that most of the initially good comprehenders maintained same positive metacognitive pattern in the 8th grade, while the two groups with average comprehension and the group with poor comprehension showed less stable patterns. Most of the changes in group membership were toward the groups with more positive metacognitive performance.

Metacognitive knowledge; summarization; text comprehension

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