Strategies that Work

The National Reading Panel identified twelve kinds of comprehension instruction that have scientific support. These help readers to construct meaning and thereby improve reading comprehension.  There are an additional two categories involving the preparation of teachers in cognitive strategy instruction.

Depending on the strategy, comprehension strategies stimulate audio and visual perception, activate memory and semantic processing, enhance perception, engage syntactic knowledge and processing, teach narrative structure, and promote reasoning.

The strategies of active listening, comprehension monitoring, and prior knowledge use all serve to promote listening and awareness of one’s thinking or “inner speech.”

• Mental imagery, mnemonic, and graphic organizer instruction, on the other hand, make use of readers’ visual imagination and memory.

• Vocabulary instruction increases word and semantic knowledge and problem solving.

• Question answering and question generation require the access of what is known or understood and the prediction of future events.

• Story structure and summarization instruction create awareness of the organization of ideas and what is important.

• Multiple strategy instruction combines the use of several of these processes together in flexible and appropriate ways.

Research conducted in the late 1990s suggests that teachers can learn to integrate these kinds of strategy instruction in classroom settings and that peers working in cooperative learning situations can effectively tutor each other in comprehension strategies.