Attitudes toward statistics influence the way students engagein learning statistics. This study examined how attitudestoward statistics were related to the comprehension of astatistics text and the accuracy with which learners judgedtheir comprehension. Results showed that more negativeattitudes were associated with lower performance onprocedural comprehension questions, but not on conceptualcomprehension questions. At the same time, more negativeattitudes resulted in overestimations of proceduralcomprehension when making prospective and retrospectivejudgments of comprehension. To explain the findings, wedraw on theoretical models that assume that learners usedifferent types of cues to make comprehension judgments.

We focused on the controversy whether high-performing readers consistently underestimate their comprehension or are prone to detrimental overestimations as much as less skilled readers are. Therefore, we conducted an experiment (N = 105 university students) to investigate judgment bias as a function of reading skill and text difficulty in terms of text cohesion. Results showed that the easy text produced underestimation of comprehension, whereas the hard text led to overestimation. Furthermore, readers with higher reading skills were less prone to overestimate their comprehension of a hard text than less skilled readers. However, we also found that more skilled readers showed lower sensitivity in discriminating between correct and incorrect answers than less skilled readers. Overall, our results do not support the idea that high-performing readers consistently underestimate their text comprehension. Findings are discussed with respect to readers’ awareness of different text-based judgment cues and their (beliefs about their) reading skill.

Refutation texts are beneficial for removing misconceptions and supporting comprehension in science. Whether these beneficial effects hold true in the domain of statistics is, however, an open question. Moreover, the role of refutation texts for the accuracy in judging one’s own comprehension (metacomprehension accuracy) has received little attention. Therefore, we conducted an experiment in which students with varying levels of statistical misconceptions read either a standard text or a refutation text in statistics, judged their text comprehension, and completed a comprehension test. The results showed that when students read the standard text, having more misconceptions resulted in poorer text comprehension and more inaccurate metacomprehension as indicated by overconfident predictions. In contrast, when students read the refutation text, the number of misconceptions was unrelated to text comprehension and metacomprehension accuracy. Apparently, refutation texts help students to pay attention to inaccuracies in their knowledge and, thereby, can promote self-regulated learning from texts.