Title: CAN YOUNGER AND OLDER ADULTS JUDGE THE QUALITY OF THEIR TEXT SUMMARIES?

Metacomprehension and aging is an understudied area of research, despite its relevance to education, social information exchange, and important work and life decisions. Results are mixed on whether older adult text comprehension, as measured by summaries, is impaired (Adams, 1991; Byrd, 1985; Jackson & Kemper, 1993) and studies of the ability to judge summary quality have not been reported in the literature. My dissertation assessed whether younger and older adults can accurately judge the quality of their text summaries and whether the summarizing goal (for professor/boss or an acquaintance/stranger) and working memory capacity affect comprehension monitoring performance. Participants showed some metacomprehension ability, as measured with summaries, but with much room for improvement. According to traditional statistics used in metacognition studies, older adults were more often overconfident, with comparatively greater age equivalency in the ability to discriminate among passages more or less well understood. Multilevel modeling suggested a pattern marked by individual differences, better between-person than within-person accuracy, and more age equivalency. MLM also suggested a more important influence of working memory and that its effects are largely independent of age effects. Whereas reading goal moderated some age effects, as measured by traditional analyses, its role was largely independent of age, as measured by MLM. Fortunately, task experience induced more accurate online judgments and more consistency between general subjective and objective metacomprehension abilities, but the need for improved metacomprehension, particularly for older adults, is apparent.