Does visualization affect monitoring accuracy, restudy choice, and comprehension scores of students in primary education?

In the present study, we investigated how 116 fourth and fifth grade students' monitoring skills were associated with restudy choices and explored whether drawing was a useful intervention to improve monitoring accuracy, restudy choice, and comprehension scores. During the first session, all students read a text, judged their learning of the information within that text, selected paragraphs to reread, reread those parts, and then made another judgment of learning (JOL) before doing a post-test. Several significant correlations were found between the various variables involved, such as higher JOLs before rereading related to fewer paragraphs being reread, and JOL-accuracy after rereading was positively correlated with the scores on the postreading questions. For the second session, students were split-up into three conditions: a control condition and two drawing conditions. In the long-drawing condition, students were allowed to draw throughout the whole second session, including post-test. In the brief drawing condition participants only got to draw the first time they read the second text. We did not find significant differences on the postreading scores. The only differences we found were that the participants in the long drawing group were more accurate in their JOLs before rereading and selected more paragraphs to reread than the other two groups, and invested more mental effort in comparison to the other groups. Drawing more elements was positively correlated with the posttest scores and JOLs, whereas drawing more details was negatively correlated with posttest scores and did not correlate with JOLs. As students in the long drawing condition drew both more elements but also created more detail in those drawings compared to the short drawing condition, it is possible that the beneficial effects of creating drawings were cancelled out by the negative effects. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.