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In a landmark 1977 study, Ellen M. Markman wondered whether readers would detect obvious logical contradictions when they read. She gave readers a passage about ants that indicated that when ants forage away from their hill they emit an invisible chemical with an odor that they use to find their way home. The passage also indicated, however, that ants have no nose and are unable to smell.
Would readers notice that the passage did not make sense?
Would they recognize that they did not understand the passage?
What would they do?
Her disturbing finding was that young and mature readers alike overwhelmingly failed to notice either logical or semantic inconsistencies in the texts.
What instruction would help readers to be more conscious of their understanding and to learn strategies that would overcome these comprehension failures?
At about the same time, Dolores Durkin observed reading instruction in fourth-grade classrooms over the course of a school year. For many student readers, fourth grade is a transition year from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” In a 1979 article, Durkin reported that there was very little comprehension instruction in the classrooms. Teachers assigned questions and told students about content. But in seventy-five hours of reading instruction Durkin observed that year, teachers devoted only twenty minutes, less than 1 percent of the time, to teaching readers how to comprehend and learn new information from reading. Her studies and the others cited above anticipated an intense interest in helping students learn strategies to comprehend and learn from reading.
In the 1970s and early 1980s investigators generally focused on teaching an individual strategy to help readers construct meaning. There were literally hundreds of studies of individual comprehension strategies. One example is Abby Adams and colleagues’ 1982 research applying the SQ3R (survey, question, read, recite, and review) technique to fifth-grade classrooms. SQ3R is a text pre-reading graphic organizer instruction developed in 1941 for World War II military personnel undergoing accelerated courses. It is considered a “text previewing” comprehension strategy instruction in that it guides readers to look for the meaning before reading the text. In this instruction, readers learn to use the text’s headings, subheads, introductions, and summaries to construct graphic schemata of the text content. As did many of the other comprehension strategy instruction researchers, Adams and her colleagues obtained positive results, finding that students with the pre-reading instruction performed significantly higher on factual short-answer tests than did control group students.
Generally, many types of individual comprehension strategy instructions appeared to be successful in improving readers’ ability to construct meaning from text. With the observed success of various individual strategy applications, there were several reviews of this growing body of scientific literature. In 1983 P. David Pearson and Margaret C. Gallagher categorized cognitive strategies by what teachers do to teach the strategies, and Robert J. Tierney and James W. Cunningham's 1984 review subdivided the cognitive strategies into pre-reading, during-reading, and post-reading activities.
With the success of individual strategy instruction in improving reading comprehension measures documented by research, focus shifted to using combinations of strategies to facilitate text comprehension, primarily in experimental situations rather than in natural classrooms. Among these was a very influential 1984 study of “reciprocal teaching” of comprehension by Annemarie S. Palincsar and Ann L. Brown. Reciprocal teaching is a method that involves the gradual release of responsibility for carrying out a strategy to the readers. It combines teacher modeling and student practice on four cognitive strategies: prediction, clarifying, summarizing, and question generation. Students who received this instruction showed marked improvement on a number of comprehension measures.
Success of teaching multiple strategies led to the study of the effectiveness of preparing teachers to teach comprehension strategies in natural, classroom settings. Two approaches are noteworthy, namely Gerald G. Duffy, Laura. R. Roehler’s and colleagues 1987 direct explanation model and Rachel Brown, Michael Pressley, and colleagues’ 1996 transactional instruction approach. Direct explanation emphasizes teacher-directed problem solving, whereas transactional instruction, similar to reciprocal teaching, employs teacher-directed actions with interactive exchanges with students in classrooms. Both direct and transactional approaches to training teachers have produced positive results.
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Reading Comprehension Strategies that Work
Reading Comprehension Strategies that Work
