Effects of Reading Goal Instructions on the Comprehension and Metacomprehension of Informative Narratives

Abstract

Informative narratives are sometimes less beneficial for text comprehension than expository texts and elicit an overestimation of comprehension. We hypothesized that informative narratives imply an entertainment goal and providing a study goal should increase comprehension and decrease overestimation. Two experiments (N₁ = 164, N₂ = 322) were conducted, based on a 2 (informative narrative vs. expository text) by 2 (entertainment vs. study goal) between-participants design. Experiment 1 indicated that the congruence of the reading goal and text genre was beneficial for performance on inferential questions, and a study goal was beneficial for factual questions. In Experiment 2, the study goal increased performance on inference questions for informative narratives, and transportation into the narrative world predicted overestimation of performance on factual questions. An overestimation of text comprehension was shown for all conditions. Thus, the results of Experiment 2 suggest that a study goal can be beneficial for building a mental model.