Multiple-strategy instruction

Readers can learn and flexibly coordinate several comprehension strategies to construct meaning from texts. In 1984, Annemarie Palincsar and and Ann L. Brown’s introduced "reciprocal teaching." This multiple-strategy method instructs readers to use four main strategies during reading: generating questions, summarizing, seeking clarification, and predicting what will occur later in the text. Additional strategies may also be introduced, including question answering, making inferences, drawing conclusions, listening, comprehension monitoring, thinking aloud, and question elaborating.

The teacher models strategies and, in some cases, explains them as they are modeled. Then the reader, either alone or as a leader of a group, applies the strategies.

The evidence indicates that demonstration and repeated use of the strategies leads to their learning by readers and improvement in comprehension.

In 1994 Barak Rosenshine and Carla Meister conducted a meta-analysis Systematic comparing of differerent scientific studies on a topic, often reporting an effect size of the combined results. of sixteen reciprocal teaching studies with students in grades one through eight. Most of the readers were above grade three. Weaker and older readers benefited most from reciprocal teaching.

In eleven studies of reciprocal teaching in grades one through six reviewed by the NRP but not covered by Rosenshine and Meister, reciprocal teaching produced clear positive improvement on tasks that involve memory, summarizing, and identification of main ideas.

Multiple-strategy programs that do not use reciprocal teaching mainly have the student practice strategies with modeling and/or feedback from the teacher. In explicit, direct approaches, the teacher always explains a strategy before the teacher models it during reading.