Effects of reading instructions on pre-service teachers’ judgment bias when learning from texts

Learning from texts means acquiring and applying knowledge, which requires students to judge their text comprehension accurately. However, students usually overestimate their comprehension, which can be caused by a misalignment between the cues used to judge one’s comprehension and the cognitive requirements of future test questions. Therefore, reading instructions might help students to use more valid cues and hence to make more accurate judgments. In two randomized experiments, we investigated the effect of application instructions (in contrast to general and memory instructions) on judgment bias regarding memory test performance and application test performance. In Experiment 1, 131 pre-service teacher students read two texts: For the first text (pretest phase), all participants received general reading instructions. For the second text (testing phase), they received one of the three reading instructions. Main results were that the general reading instructions in the pretest phase resulted in underestimation for memory test performance and overestimation for application test performance. Results from the testing phase yielded mixed effects and, overall, no strong evidence that reading instructions, and in particular application instructions, are beneficial for debiasing judgments of comprehension. Experiment 2 (N = 164 pre-service teachers) restudied the effects with the same texts but a different study design. Results replicated the effects found in the testing phase of Experiment 1. Overall, the results indicated that reading instructions without further support are not sufficient to help students to accurately judge their comprehension and suggested that text characteristics might impact the effect of reading instructions on judgment bias.