The effects of domain knowledge on metacomprehension accuracy

In the present research, we examined the relationship between readers’ domain knowledge and their ability to judge their comprehension of novel domain-related material. Participants with varying degrees of baseball knowledge read five texts on baseball-related topics and five texts on non-baseball-related topics, predicted their performance, and completed tests for each text. Baseball knowledge was positively related to absolute accuracy within the baseball domain but was unrelated to relative accuracy within the baseball domain. Also, the readers showed a general underconfidence bias, but the bias was less extreme for higher knowledge readers. The results challenge common assumptions that experts’ metacognitive judgments are less accurate than novices’. Results involving topic familiarity ratings and a no-reading control group suggest that higher knowledge readers are not more likely to ignore text-specific cues in favor of a domain familiarity heuristic, but they do appear to make more effective use of domain familiarity in predicting absolute performance levels.