In the three previous posts on reading for understanding (here, here, and here) I looked at the general question: What can we say for sure (or not) in research on comprehension in reading? Here, I take a closer look at comprehension strategies and what the research does and doesn’t say. In general, it supports many of the blunt comments I made here and here a few years ago: there is still a lack of clarity about what the right strategies are, how to teach them, and which ones work for older students (my focus in these current posts).
Most importantly, the research reveals a very spotty record in terms of transfer of the strategies from individual lessons to a self-regulated repertoire used effectively and autonomously by the reader – the very point of my earlier post for which some took me to task (& some in nasty ad hominem ways).
Below, I provide key quotes from core reports and research summaries of the past 15 years on the strategies; first, the positive, then the negative. Then, I provide my own concise summary of what I think the key take-aways are for teachers of reading, ELA, and English from grades 4-12.
From the National Reading Panel Report of 2000:
The idea behind explicit instruction of text comprehension was that comprehension could be improved by teaching students to use specific cognitive strategies or to reason strategically when they encountered barriers to comprehension in reading. The goal of such training was the achievement of competent and self-regulated reading. Analyses of the 203 studies on instruction of text comprehension led to the identification of 16 different kinds of effective procedures. Of the 16 types of instruction, 8 offered a firm scientific basis for concluding that they improve comprehension. The eight kinds of instruction that appear to be effective and most promising for classroom instruction are –
- Comprehension monitoring in which the reader learns how to be aware or conscious of his or her understanding during reading and learns procedures to deal with problems in understanding as they arise.
- Cooperative learning in which readers work together to learn strategies in the context of reading.
- Graphic and semantic organizers that allow the reader to represent graphically (write or draw) the meanings and relationships of the ideas that underlie the words in the text.
- Story structure from which the reader learns to ask and answer who, what, where, when, and why questions about the plot and, in some cases, maps out the time line, characters, and events in stories.
- Question answering in which the reader answers questions posed by the teacher and is given feedback on the correctness.
- Question generation in which the reader asks himself or herself what, when, where, why, what will happen, how, and who questions.
- Summarization in which the reader attempts to identify and write the main or most important ideas that integrate or unite the other ideas or meanings of the text into a coherent whole.
- Multiple-strategy teaching in which the reader uses several of the procedures in interaction with the teacher over the text. Multiple-strategy teaching is effective when the procedures are used flexibly and appropriately by the reader or the teacher in naturalistic contexts.
From the research on comprehension and metacognitive strategies, as summarized in the Reading Comprehension Handbook and the RAND report on reading:
Skilled comprehenders use metacognitive strategies significantly more often than less skilled readers. Less skilled comprehenders were significantly less likely to make inferences from text even with the equal background knowledge…[emphasis added] This supports the notion that comprehension requires flexible simultaneous consideration of multiple elements. The extent to which children slow down their reading on encountering inconsistent information is a significant predictor of comprehension.
Comprehension monitoring accounted for unique variance, once working memory and other background factors were controlled. [emphasis added] An important aspect of strategy development is to enable students to become self-initiating… Students who spontaneously apply a strategy, such as questioning, when it is sensible will improve their comprehension. Thus, to be effective comprehenders, students must have motivation, self-efficacy, and ownership regarding their purposes for reading and their strategies. Teaching strategies integrated with content enables students to become proficient, self-regulating strategy users. [emphasis added]
HOWEVER:
From Questioning the Author:
Promoting the use of reading strategies attempts to focus on the ongoing process of reading. A potential drawback of strategy-based instruction, however, is that both teachers’ and students’ attention may be drawn too easily to the surface features of the strategies themselves rather than to the meaning of what is being read. In fact, some researchers have questioned the necessity of emphasizing specific strategies if the goal of reading as an active search for meaning was upmost in the reader’s mind.
From the Rand expert panel report on reading, 2002:
Teaching students in grades 3–6 to identify and represent story structure improves their comprehension of the story they have read. In the case of this strategy, there was no evidence that the strategy transferred to the reading of new stories. [emphasis added]
Explicit instruction generates the immediate use of comprehension strategies, but there is less evidence that students continue to use the strategies in the classroom and outside of school after instruction ends (Keeny, Cannizzo & Flavell, 1967; Ringel & Springer, 1980) or that they transfer the strategies to new situations. If comprehension strategies are taught with an array of content and a range of texts that are too wide, then students will not fully learn them.
If strategies are taught with too narrow a base of content or text, then students do not have a chance to learn how to transfer them to new reading situations (Rosenshine & Meister, 1994). The optimal balance enables students to learn that strategies are an important means for understanding but are not the main point of reading activities.
The main purposes for reading are gaining meaning and gaining knowledge. If students learn that strategies are tools for understanding the conceptual content of text, then the strategies become purposeful and integral to reading activities…. Unless the strategies are closely linked with knowledge and understanding in a content area, students are unlikely to learn the strategies fully, may not perceive the strategies as valuable tools, and are less likely to use them in new learning situations with new text.
From the Reading Comprehension Handbook:
Rather than teaching students how to become self regulated learners, teachers seem to expect behaviors would naturally developed through prompted questions. There is of course no evidence that such prompting leads to anything like active self-regulated use of comprehension strategies.
Improving performance is possible. However there is less evidence that comprehension-focused interventions produce either autonomous use of comprehension strategies or longer-term improvements in comprehension proficiencies. It is difficult for many teachers to understand the necessity of keeping the content of the text at the forefront while teaching strategies…
This [lack of improved comprehension of the content] occurs, for example, when teachers only ask students questions about which strategies they used and why, instead of asking questions about the content of the selection.
The lack of evidence [about when and to what extent strategy instruction transfers] stems from the heavy reliance on smaller sample sizes and shorter-term intervention designs as well as limited attention to a gold standard of transfer of training to autonomous use.
Younger readers have little awareness that they must attempt to make sense of text they think that reading is decoding – reading as word understanding. Older students were no less likely to classify their difficulties at the word level than younger students [as opposed to the sentence or paragraph level]. 3rd and 5th grade students relied almost exclusively on word-level criteria for evaluating their understanding, replicating the findings of Baker more than 20 years earlier. Similarly, Eme et al. found that third graders’ conception of a good reader was one who reads quickly without making mistakes, replicating the findings of Myers and Paris 30 years earlier. [Thus] research findings still look a great deal like they did originally which is quite troubling. Change is slow.
My brief summary:
1. Students need to understand both the purpose of academic reading – successful meaning-making of the text – and that a skilled use of a repertoire of strategies can help that meaning-making. Current instruction unwittingly undermines both goals.
2. Many students think comprehension is “knowing what the words mean” and “what the author said”. Thus, many students do not understand the goal or nature of reading for meaning. As a result, the strategies will naturally seem pointless and/or not stick or transfer.
3. Only a few strategies are key to reading for understanding, and most have to do with self-monitoring and fix-up when understanding breaks down. The key “strategy” is metacognitive self-monitoring because without it, there is no awareness of misunderstanding and thus no need for the strategies. Far greater attention has to be placed on getting readers to feel the lack of understanding/slow down in the face of the realization that they do not get it.
4. There is very little research on use of the strategies with non-fiction texts with middle and high school students. What research does exist focuses on the need to build meaning by self-monitoring and connecting different parts of the text AND the need for coherent and meaningful texts (which textbooks are often NOT). What research does exist makes clear that self-prompted main idea/summarization is the most important strategy.
5. Transfer is rare because teachers are not designing backward from it. They are merely teaching different strategies, one at a time; that CANNOT cause transfer.
6. The strategies can only transfer i.e. be seen as useful forms of self-regulation by the learner if their use enhances understanding of challenging text; and if the teacher makes clear (through modeling and gradual release) that the strategies reflect a repertoire to be wisely selected from and used flexibly when understanding breaks down.
7. All of the successful interventions with strategies use a steady diet of formative assessments involving new appropriately challenging texts to be read cold to see if comprehension and the use of strategies autonomously and effectively is improving. In my final comment on reading for understanding, I’ll quote from a few key studies about how instruction needs to change and offer my own thoughts on a key neglected part of this whole work: making sure that you choose the right texts and questions for developing strategic thinking while reading.
31 Responses
Thank u for this informative post! I’ve been teaching 2nd and 3rd graders the past 11 years and have been on a quest for finding the most effective ways to instruct them on comprehension strategies- ways that will ensure that they transfer the strategies to a cold read. I do think Vicky Vinton and Dorothy Barnhouse get this right in their text, “What Readers Really Do.” Having students question the author throughout the text using a t-chart to jot down questions and revelations. I’ve also tweeted Vicki and asked her thoughts about how to effectively teach students how to navigate through nonfiction texts- a challenge for many students. She suggested we have the students connect the details from each paragraph and section and then summarize the main idea of the text. I’ve explicitly taught my students to annotate main ideas within the margin and then summarize the text. I’ve seen more and more students applying this strategy on biweekly cold reading assessments so am feeling hopeful. I look forward to reading your final post!
Nicole – thanks for sharing this! As I noted before, the Vinton/Barnhouse work is first-rate. And their suggestions as you report them make perfect sense to me – in line with what I am going to recommend, in fact. Let us know how much progress your kids make!!
Can I exaggerate? English teachers’ responses to suggestions that they include more non fiction were generally so negative one would think they’d been told to include pornography.
Your post tells us that researchers have done almost no research using non-fiction texts.
Here’s what I think. English teachers do not have more than the faintest idea of how non-fiction works – the variety of organizations it can take, the myriad of voices, its functions (sometimes combined) and so on. One can’t deeply understand comprehension if you lack it yourself. (I know, I’ve mixed the “one” with the “you” – forgive.)
True, everyone does not “read” alike – even skilled readers – but having some sense that there is a system, there are behaviors, there are habits and truly believing that because your belief is grounded in your own experience and that of others – essential, I think.
The National Writing Project has as a central notion “how I write.” Every reading and literature program should include “how I read.” Perhaps you came across “think-alouds” In the Feb. “iWired” there’s a little piece about an app that can follow one’s searches and how we might “read” and make use of the paths it shows us.n your research. And, by the way, “Wired” could serve as a non-fiction text all on its own.
One last comment w/o enough explanation — I think your definition of “background knowledge” is likely too limited.
Thanks for listening, and thanks for gathering all this “stuff” together so concisely – I mean all four posts.
Thanks, Marilyn. The two interventions that DO use non-fiction in upper grades – Reciprocal Teaching and Questioning the Author – make clear that the key is following the argument to and from Main Idea via Summaries – not unlike thawed I taught logical analysis thru topic sentences of texts 40 years ago.
I simply fail to understand the HS backlash against non-fiction – I faced it twice in the last month at school PD sessions.
As for NWP: I think the equivalent in reading MUST be done, just like they demand you write: if you teach reading you mUST read challenging text, monitor your reading, and reflect on the process. Just look at the comments in reading the Kant selection to see the value!
As for “background knowledge”, I assume it to mean personal experience as well as prior academic learning. But the research makes crystal clear that the problem is not “knowledge” but “retrieval of relevant knowledge, on one’s own, drawn from ANY relevant source. So, I guess I don’t think my view is too narrow; what am I missing?
“I simply fail to understand the HS backlash against non-fiction – I faced it twice in the last month at school PD sessions.”
Isn’t the reason for this rather easy? Most HS reading/English/Language Arts teachers didn’t get into teaching cause they love non-fiction. They love Shakespeare or Kipling or Yeats or Thoreau or romanticism or fantasy or epics. HS reading teachers don’t see non-fiction as part of their responsibility because they’ve don’t love non-fiction.
Maybe so. But they are also aware that non-fiction can sometimes be less emotive. It’s not always true and certainly teachers can layer excitement and emotion on top. However, you fall in love with Shakespeare, Kipling, Yeats, Thoreau, etc. You learn more when there is emotion. It is hard to feel the same way about- and yes, I’m going to say it- the Declaration of Independence. As much as it is revered and very important for kids to actually read, it’s just not as exciting for teens.
And this gets to the crux of the problem- motivating students. It’s key. If we can figure out how to make kids partners in their learning and not sponges to sit and absorb info, we can let them choose. Reading should not be “here students, read this” for learning. There should be a topic- “Students- how many of you think voting is important?”. As students discuss, materials can be sought out to back up assertions. Papers can be written to take positions. Solutions can be found via research. Current events can be utilized to see what is happening around the state or nation. Students can pick parts of the topic to explore and be tasked with that. Maybe they read both a non-fiction book and a fiction book on the topic- comparing the type of book. How does a non-fiction book discuss this? How do we get the theme of this from the fiction book? What does that tell us as having fiction as a good format for subversive messages? You get the idea.
We are having the wrong argument when we say “fiction or non-fiction”.
“Most HS reading/English/Language Arts teachers didn’t get into teaching cause they love non-fiction.”
You are lumping three different licensure areas together here. I think we need to be careful about pointing fingers and telling one another what we should or shouldn’t be teaching. Is there a place for nonfiction in an English class? Absolutely. However, there could also be an argument that there is a place for literate instruction in math, social studies, and science. If the goal is a transfer of skills and strategies in all types of reading, why does it only need to happen in a Language Arts or English class? You are correct that most English teachers get into teaching because of works like those by Shakespeare and not because they really want to teach nonfiction. However, I bet most science and social studies teachers got into that area because of the content and not because they wanted to teach students how to read nonfiction. So let’s not point fingers and instead, let’s share the responsibility of teaching this generation to be literate!
Grant.. Where do you think teachers go wrong with interventions? Too scaffolded? Isolated skills?
The whole RTI industry is built on teaching an isolated skill and assessing it after 6 weeks. Reading involves so many skills and strategies, it is difficult to address one at a time
The next post is on true vs. false gradual release of responsibility. The problem is double: too much scaffolding and teaching one skill or strategy in isolation and testing for it not only in isolation but once. This CANNOT work. More shortly…
I’m really looking forward to that post. One thing I’m seeing a lot – and I think Chloe and I shared this with you – is far too much scaffolding in the ed reform world (no excuses charters, TFA, etc.)
There is a genuine and heartfelt attempt to have all students be able to read the “great books.” When kids arrive 3-5 years below grade level, the only way to have this happen is through heavy scaffolding. In my experience, those scaffolds aren’t removed – which makes sense, seeing as the students aren’t in an ideal position to grow as readers.
Nick, i too know that this is a key problem – I have seen it numerous times. That’s why I am going to devote the next post exclusively to gradual release of responsibility.
I’m finding some discrepancy between your earlier recognition of Reciprocal Teaching / reciprocal reading as a powerful teaching strategy with your seven point summary. Catherine Snow pointed the importance of the socio-cultural context in her 2002 RAND study (http://www.prgs.edu/content/dam/rand/pubs/monograph_reports/2005/MR1465.pdf) This paper challenged some of the conclusions of the National Reading Panel (2000). We have to acknowledge the social and interactive nature of strategy instruction. It’s about the students doing more of the talking in the classroom than the teacher.
A good example might be CORI – John Guthrie’s work combines a focus on discipline-specific reading strategies, collaboration, curiosity, reading engagement, and conceptual knowledge in content areas like science and social studies (see http://www.corilearning.com/ or a recent research paper Guskie and Klauda, _Reading_Research_Quarterly_, 2014, “Effects of Classroom Practices on Reading Comprehension, Engagement, and Motivations for Adolescents”)
CORI is another of the highly regarded approaches in the Handbook. I guess I don’t see a discrepancy: RT showed the research and practitioner community that dialog between kids using a protocol for inquiry into the text and that fostered gradual release was effective. That doesn’t make it the last word or suggest it doesn’t have flaws. Not only did Catherine Snow say context matters, so did Paris et all in 1983. What I like about RT is the clear focus on a few strategies at the heart of comprehension and the gradual release model; and that it set that direction.
Grant,
This series has been great so far. I find it interesting that there is so little research on nonfiction text for 6-12 grades. My own experience is that students ability to critically read nonfiction develops best through progressive scaffolding that involves corroborating, comparing, and contrasting related texts.
Here’s how it would look in history: In 6th grade, students read primary and secondary sources that are near grade level. Through sourcing and contextualization, they need to corroborate the evidence and come to their own judgement. Early in the year, you do this with heavy scaffolds and gradually, you release them. (Best demonstrated, in my opinion, in Sam Wineburg and Stanford’s Reading Like a Historian curriculum)
By the time they reach 11th and 12th grades, students do something similar but with sophisticated academic texts. Again, the release of scaffolds should be deliberate and purposeful.
My experience is that when I do this, I see transfer. Students begin to read any nonfiction text – compare it to what they already know and, if they don’t know much, simply ask skeptical questions – and tear nonfiction apart in the best possible way.
How does this mesh with your recent research?
Thanks,
Nick
I should add (though perhaps it goes without saying) that this involves heavy and consistent modeling.
This is precisely what has to happen – explicit and deliberate discussion and modeling of where we’re headed in terms of self-regulated reading, with explicit and deliberate removal of scaffolds, supported by lots of formative assessments and lots of de-briefs as to what they did and what worked, what didn’t – just like in athletics. Yes, the Wineburg work is solid!
Thank you for this series. One of the most widely used assessments for K-6 reading is DIBELS. If I’ve understood your thoughts correctly, you would agree that schools that are taking student performance on this assessment, and teaching each skill separately, are not helping to improve student scores? And, may in fact be hurting student comprehension because of recommended rates of fluency and/or accuracy?
That’s true, Billie. The isolated skill teaching cannot help much and may impede things. The same concerns have been raised – appropriately so – about the most common RTI approaches. It’s not that recommended rates of fluency/accuracy are of no value, it is that they do not lead to the ultimate goal of self-regulated comprehension as a matter of course. Simple analogy: you need to teach kids to dribble in soccer, but dribbling, by itself, in sideline drills, will not make them effective self-regulated soccer players. In fact, they won’t even know WHEN to dribble and when NOT TO. In other words, the goal is strategic thinking based on metacognitive awareness of what is working in terms of comprehension and what isn’t. A complete concentration on fluency misses the point (even if it has initial value). More in my next post on gradual release…
Reblogged this on mariatdehaan.
I wrote a couple of posts about 4 years ago on teaching reading to college STEM majors:
https://gasstationwithoutpumps.wordpress.com/2011/05/13/technical-reading/
https://gasstationwithoutpumps.wordpress.com/2011/06/06/teaching-technical-reading/
These posts were in response to an excellent post by Mylène about teaching engineering tech students how to read technical material: Experimenting with Reading Comprehension Constructors: http://shiftingphases.com/2011/05/13/experimenting-with-reading-comprehension-constructors/
Excellent – will check out and add to the links I will post after last column.
Your work is immensely powerful and will improve the lives of the kids I teach. Just wanted to say a sincere thank you. I await your posts just like I anticipate the next chapter of an ‘un-put-down-able’ book.
Your four posts on Reading/Literacy have got me thinking about the state of affairs in mathematics, where there is very little idea about what a student sees when faced with a piece of symbolic math. I am embarking on a small local investigation of this with our students at our ballet school, and if interesting results appear I will take it further.
A pet peeve of mine is that heuristics is almost never taught in a formal structured way a la G Polya in How to Solve It. I am at a loss to understand why this has not been made more central to teaching given that no math book except Euclid’s Elements has ever sold more copies.
I cannot emphasize enough how important this post has been to me. I have been concerned with reading comprehension for quite awhile now (I teach 3rd grade). From reading math word problems, to all kinds of texts, to following directions, to searching for and using information in all kinds of text – especially non-fiction expository and functional. The current Lucy Calkins type curriculum we have now is not cutting it. I feel as though the emperor has no clothes – except it’s the curriculum has no teeth. I’ve decided to make this better, at least in my own classroom and with my third grade team. Your blog has been a great start, beginning with your ideas, your meta-analysis, and your references.
I had a parent teacher conference a couple nights ago. I was trying to explain to the parent that her daughter struggled with inferring. The parent did not know what that meant. This is a parent of a child who is upper middle class. The child has had many rich experiences in her life, a wealth of “schema”.
As an example, I brought out a text on the child’s reading level – a level O text (she is on grade level). I told the parent that inferring is when one is able to determine what is implied but not said. To use clues from the context of the text to understand what is actually happening.
I read a brief paragraph to the parent (the parent also read along with me). The undeniable implication was that the child in the story had stepped in dog poop. Prior to the paragraph the story is all about some kids trying to solve a mystery – to find the dog of a man in the story. It reads “Buzz stepped in something smelly” among other clues. (We had also read the blurb on the back cover, that a clue to finding the dog could be found on the bottom of the shoe.
The parent was not able to infer either. She also turned her nose up at the importance of not being able to infer, “well, no on would be able to get that.” This is not an illiterate woman.
I’m determined to teach these kids comprehension, and since the tools aren’t “explicitly” in our curriculum, your posts have given me a great start. Thank you.
Thanks for this support! (I found the Beers chapter on inferring very illuminating for just the reasons you describe…) I’ll offer some practical tips in the last posts on how to get kids to 1. understand that inference is key to understanding, 2) how to get them to practice and improve at inferring, 3) how to become more self-regulated in doing so.
Reblogged this on The education of a teacher. and commented:
I am reblogging this series by Grant Wiggins on the research around comprehension reading strategies because it is an important resource for literacy teachers, which nearly all of us are in this day and age of CCSS.
Here are my key takeaways from Part 4:
1. “It is difficult for many teachers to understand the necessity of keeping the content of the text at the forefront while teaching strategies… This [lack of improved comprehension of the content] occurs, for example, when teachers only ask students questions about which strategies they used and why, instead of asking questions about the content of the selection.”
2. “Many students think comprehension is “knowing what the words mean” and “what the author said”. Thus, many students do not understand the goal or nature of reading for meaning. As a result, the strategies will naturally seem pointless and/or not stick or transfer.”
3. “Far greater attention has to be placed on getting readers to feel the lack of understanding/slow down in the face of the realization that they do not get it.”
4. “The strategies can only transfer i.e. be seen as useful forms of self-regulation by the learner if their use enhances understanding of challenging text; and if the teacher makes clear (through modeling and gradual release) that the strategies reflect a repertoire to be wisely selected from and used flexibly when understanding breaks down.”
Teaching reading comprehension via such “strategies” is very much in vogue. What are the alternatives? Where to look for schools that approach reading in some other manner?
Daniel Willingham and the Core Knowledge folks recommend approaching reading through rich content (fiction and non-fiction) with the emphasis on the content. Is this a black-and-white dichotomy? Is there a middle ground?
As I have tried to show, there is indeed a middle ground: the appropriate use of a few strategies, taught correctly. All the research makes clear that background content knowledge is important but nowhere near sufficient. The key takeaway form the research is that even when you control for background knowledge, comprehension strategy teaching makes a real difference. But the problem is not content knowledge; the problem is appropriate retrieval of the RIGHT knowledge – and few studies show that occurring with ANY method, i.e. transfer is hard to achieve. That’s why I am writing this series. My suggestions in the next post(s) will show you that middle ground, in fact.
As someone who teaches HS social studies I am really interested (and more than a little saddened) that there seems to be so little work done with non-fiction above grade 6. My school colleagues and I feel that this is one of the major keys to trying to unlock what our students need to be doing when they leave high school, but which frankly (and as you alluded to in an earlier post) we are not achieving the results that I think that we wish we would. Certainly we will be moving forward on trying to do something with this across all our social studies classes where the work will clearly be with non-fiction pieces. From my point of view many of these fundamentals are also applicable to non-text based sources (like editorial cartoons – which are an important aspect of our curriculum). It has been really interesting to read your blog so far, thank you for doing all this work for those of us who are looking for a means to put some of this into practice.
Thanks, Greg. I will summarize some of the work done in social studies – there is some – at the secondary level, but there isn’t much. However, there are numerous resources on reading critically that are grounded in the research that I will call attention to in the next posts.