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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