Illusion of knowing in adult readers: Effects of reading skill and passage length

The importance of comprehension monitoring, or the ability to evaluate whether comprehension has been successful, is discussed in terms of van Dijk and Kintsch's (1983) model of discourse processing. Failure to monitor may impede comprehension and prevent learning. When monitoring failure occurs at the same time a reader exhibits high confidence in comprehension, it is called Illusion of Knowing, or IK (Glenberg, Wilkinson, & Epstein, 1982). Although previous monitoring investigations have used passages with embedded contradictions, we used unaltered or intact expository text to investigate the effects of reading skill and passage length on IK. Good and poor adult readers read a short and long version of the same passage. Results indicate that monitoring accuracy is not related to reading skill and that IK is more likely to occur with a short excerpt of text, while the longer version of the passage elicits more accurate monitoring. Instructional and research implications of these findings are discussed. (C) 1997 Academic Press.