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

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