Comprehension monitoring of written discourse across early-to-middle adolescence

Comprehension monitoring is conceptualized as a metacognitive process involving monitoring and control of ongoing discourse processing. The error-detection paradigm was used in an experiment in which 315 7th-, 9th-, and 11th-grade students of low-to-high reading ability monitored and controlled their reading as they searched three times through a text. Search One showed that although all readers failed to monitor many problems, monitoring at lexical, syntactic, and particularly semantic levels increased with age and reading ability. Monitoring for low-ability readers remained low at all three grades. Search Two showed an asymmetry in the effects of instruction to search for errors, and some students exhibited constraints on monitoring and control. Finally, Search Three showed that some students had knowledge necessary to monitor more errors but failed to apply that knowledge to the text.