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Metacognitive Strategies for Reading Comprehension

Students who are taught reading comprehension strategies aremore successful readers. Whilesome students may eventually learn some of these strategies on their own, theycan be taught quite effectively in the early elementary grades. Here are ten reading comprehensionstrategies from Ellin Keene’s book AssessingComprehension Thinking Strategies to consider.

1. Think out loud. Good readers monitor their thinking while reading.

2. Use schema. Consciously connect the text to preexisting knowledge and experiencesand consider how it helps their understanding of the text.

3. Inferring. Use experience and information from the text to draw conclusions, makeconnections, predictions, and form opinions.

4. Ask questions about the text before, during, and afterreading.

5. Make decisions about what is important in the text(elements and themes). Be able tosummarize the main points.

6. Set a purpose for reading to make it meaningful.

7. Monitor comprehension. Make sure students have strategies in place if they find thetext too difficult.

8. Visualize what is being read. Make brain movies! Tune into the sensory and emotional images of the text to enhance thevisualization. Use thisinformation to help make inferences and draw conclusions.

9. Synthesizing and retelling. Keeping track of their impressions while reading andidentifying the underlying meaning of the text. Connect the text to information from other sources. Extending that information beyond thetext to form opinions and read critically.

10. Text structure. Understanding the elements of a story and how stories are put togetherhelps students analyze and think critically about meaning.

Even learning just one or two of these metacognitivestrategies has been shown to make a difference in reading performance. Which strategies do your studentsalready use? Which ones will theylearn next?

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Comment by Angie Rumsey on January 23, 2011 at 9:15pm: OOOh What a great idea Shelly. I'll have to try that. Thanks for sharing!

Comment by Diane Dahl on January 23, 2011 at 9:12pm: What a great idea Shelly! I'm going to try that. Thank you for sharing!

Comment by Shelly Surridge on January 23, 2011 at 5:57pm: We've been exploring the visualizing strategy and this past week I pulled out some classical music. First I had them put their heads down and just listen for one minute. When the minute was up I kept the music playing and told them to draw what they saw in their heads. It was so much fun! Then we compared that all our drawings were different (just as readers take different things away from what they read) and I asked them to share WHY they drew what they drew. I was really excited about the reasoning they used! They seemed to make the connection to what a mental image was very easily and they BEGGED to do more! That's a great learning experience!

Comment by Bruce Brown on January 17, 2011 at 6:57pm: We have created a fun iPod app in a bingo like format to help students practice the 5W's - Who, What, Why, When, Where. Students read controlled reading level passages about Inventors and their Inventions, the answer the questions. App is on 3 different levels of reading difficult.

Check us out at the iTunes store.
http://bit.ly/fEhkM1

Bruce Brown

www.eskillslearning.net

Comment by Diane Dahl on January 17, 2011 at 11:10am: Just created student blogs for this purpose! Great suggestion ladies!

Comment by Diane Dahl on January 17, 2011 at 11:05am: Angie, Mary, and Mayus,

Would you guys mind putting those suggestions on the Brain-Based Teaching group page? Those are excellent suggestions.

Thanks, Diane

Comment by MAYUS CHAVEZ on January 13, 2011 at 11:28pm: I work on some strategies during the reading, we are using transmedia and children post their thoughts in a blog.

We share from one school to another

http://jvs-itycprogram.blogspot.com

Comment by Mary Jane Waite on January 12, 2011 at 9:53pm: I will be focusing on these strategies with my high school seniors in two weeks. I will have all of them practice listening to the three voices in their head that Chris Tovani mentions (reading voice, the voice responding to the text, and the distracting voice) throughout the semester, but ask them to commit one other strategy every month.

I am hoping to strengthen their foundation before we begin to do "research".

Comment by Diane Dahl on January 12, 2011 at 7:18pm: OMG, that is fantastic! I love the way you have them post it on a blog. I'm going to do that with my class!

Comment by Angie Rumsey on January 12, 2011 at 6:50pm: In Third grade we teach them how to write a thinking stem. It looks something like this:

I am reading ... (name of story)... by (author ... In my story ( tell me an event that is happening in your story) then they write a thinking stem - (I'm thinking... feeling,... seeing... noticing... or this reminds me of....) After they write one stem - they write two more with the same formula.

It's a lot of work, but good for checking comprehension. It also checks to see if they are being meta-cognitive. I do this about once a week - about....

Here are some rough ones

kidblogs