SQ3R

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.