Understanding the Delayed-Keyword Effect on Metacomprehension Accuracy

The typical finding from research on metacomprehension is that accuracy is quite low. However, recent studies have shown robust accuracy improvements when judgments follow certain generation tasks (summarizing or keyword listing), but only when these tasks are performed at a delay rather than immediately after reading (Thiede & Anderson, 2003; Thiede, Anderson & Therriault, 2003). The delayed and immediate conditions in these past studies confounded the delay between reading and generation tasks with other task lags, such as the lag between multiple generation tasks and the lag between generation tasks and judgments. The first two experiments disentangle these confounded manipulations and provide clear evidence that the delay between reading and keyword generation is the only lag critical to improving metacomprehension accuracy. The third and fourth experiments show that not all delayed tasks will produce improvements and suggest that delayed generative tasks provide diagnostic cues about comprehension that are necessary for improving metacomprehension accuracy.