Enhancing Calibration.

Calibration of comprehension is the correlation between subjective assessments of knowledge gained from reading and performance on an objective test. Contrary to intuition, typically this correlation is close to zero. This article is structured around four points concerning calibration of comprehension. First, poor calibration is the rule, rather than the exception. Second, we present two experiments that demonstrate that poor calibration is not associated with a particular type of performance test, but it is found with inference tests, verbatim recognition tests, and idea recognition tests. Third, the evidence from three experiments indicates that a likely reason for poor calibration is that subjects assess familiarity with the general domain of a text instead of assessing knowledge gained from a particular text. Fourth, we demonstrate that calibration of comprehension can be enhanced if subjects are given a pre-test that provides self-generated feedback. Even this ability is limited, however.