Children's concept of understanding, its role in comprehension monitoring

Research in the area of comprehension monitoring shows that children often fail to monitor their own comprehension. This study hypothesizes that what these poor monitors may lack is a concept of understanding. A concept of understanding is argued to involve aspects of information and information transfer. Thus subjects were tested on their ability to judge information adequacy, assess information perspective, ascribe understanding and describe the purpose of discourse. Children ages 3 to 7 years were tested for comprehension monitoring ability as well as for a concept of understanding. Most tests showed a substantial increase in performance on measures of a concept of understanding and of comprehension monitoring at around age five. The two types of tasks were highly related in that high monitors were consistently superior in measures of understanding understanding. The results show that comprehension monitoring can be explained by the acquisition of s concept of understanding.