Abstract

Research shows that misconceptions are usually detrimental to text comprehension. However, whether misconceptions also impair metacomprehension accuracy, that is, the accuracy with which one self-assesses one's text comprehension, has received far less attention. We conducted a study in which we examined students' (N = 47) comprehension and metacomprehension accuracy (prediction accuracy and postdiction accuracy) of a statistics text as a function of their statistical misconceptions. Text comprehension and metacomprehension accuracy referred to both conceptual and procedural aspects of statistics. The results showed that students who had more misconceptions achieved poorer conceptual text comprehension and, at the same time, provided more overconfident predictions of their conceptual and procedural text comprehension than students who had fewer misconceptions. In contrast, postdiction accuracy of conceptual and procedural text comprehension was not affected by misconceptions.

Citation

Prinz, A., Golke, S. & Wittwer, J. (2018). The Double Curse of Misconceptions: Misconceptions Impair Not Only Text Comprehension but Also Metacomprehension in the Domain of Statistics. Instructional Science: An International Journal of the Learning Sciences, 46(5), 723-765. Retrieved December 11, 2023 from https://www.learntechlib.org/p/191861/.

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Keywords

• Accuracy
• Concept Formation
• Mathematical Concepts
• metacognition
• Misconceptions
• reading comprehension
• Statistics
• student attitudes