Success bred more success

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.