Types of Reading Comprehension Strategies

Basic Skills & Reinforcement (low)

Text Enhancements (moderate)

Self-Questioning (high)

Vocabulary Instruction (BS)

Training individual vocabulary

Facilitated recall of vocabulary but not comprehension

Link between vocabulary & comprehension was unclear (Pany, Jenkins, & Schreck, 1982)

Practice shared vocabulary in reading

Repeated Reading (BS)

Reread passages or stories (3 vs. 7)

Increase fluency, accuracy, comprehension, & story retelling

Theory of Automaticity (greater fluency) (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974; Samuels, 1979)

Effects of repeated reading on new material

Positive effects with shared words from previous passages (Rashotte & Torgesen, 1985)

Monitor motivation

Repeated Readings: For Teachers

Explain to students how practice helps reading.

Select appropriate reading rate goals for each student.

Select reading selections at appropriate reading levels for each student.

Determine how to calculate the reading rates by using pre-counted passages or by using a designated amount of minutes each time.

Teach students how to calculate, record, and interpret reading rates.

Direct Instruction (BS)

Explicit, skill-based, teacher-directed

Scripted teacher presentations

Controlled vocabulary

Corrective reading (Lloyd et al., 1980)

Reading Mastery (Polloway et al., 1986)

DISTAR (Stein & Goldman, 1980)

Components: structure, clarity, redundancy, task sequencing, feedback

Text Enhancements

Provide pictures or images (T.L. Rose, 1986; Warner & Alley, 1981)

Spatial organization of text (Darch & Carnine, 1986)

Mnemonic illustrations (Mastropieri, Scruggs, & Levin, 1987)

Adjunct aids & study guides (Horton & Lovitt, 1989)

Semantic relationship charts (Bos, Anders, Filip, & Jaffe, 1989)

Imagery (TE)

Construct pictures in your mind about material (F.L Clark, Deshler, Schumaker, Alley, & Warner, 1984; Coop, 1982; Flaro, 1987; M.C. Rose, Cundick, & Higbee, 1983; Warner & Alley, 1981)

Illustrations are unavailable

Break strategy in three steps

Tell students to read a passage

Think of picture to present content

Describe mental picture to you or peer

Provide feedback on quality of image

Mnemonics Illustrations (TE)

Memory strategy (keyword/pegword)

Rehearse before, during, & after

Substantially outperformed control students in learning new facts or vocabulary (Mastropieri & Scruggs, 1989)

Promote recall by enhancing concreteness & meaningfulness (Mastropieri, Scruggs, & Levin, 1985)

Students could be trained to generate keyword strategies enhance science text Scruggs & Mastropieri (1992) * King-Sears, Mercer , & Sindelar (1992)

Absent from commerical textbooks (Levin et al., 1987)

Spatial Organization (TE)

Organization of content from text

Charts & diagrams

Explain information visually (Winn, 1987)

Visual-spatial displays depicted content & interrelationships (Carnine, 1986)

Outperformed students without displays

Spatial organized features related to reading/listening passage facilitated oral retelling over presentation of list of features (Mastropieri & Peters, 1987)

Self-Questioning Strategies

Activating prior knowledge (Sachs, 1984)

Summarizing information (Jenkins, Heliotis, Stein, & Haynes, 1987)

Redirect attributions (Borkowski et al., 1988)

Monitor performance (Graves, 1986)

Use elaborative interrogation (Scruggs, Mastropieri, & Sullivan, 1994)

Text-structure based strategies (Bakken, 1995)

Multicomponent training packages (Schumaker, Deshler, Warner, & Denton, 1982)

TELLS Fact or Fiction (SQ)
Preview activity to facilitate comprehension

Asses the effects of activating prior knowledge

Studying story titles

Examine pages for clue words

Look for important words

Look for hard words

Describe the setting of story

Answer whether story Fact or Fiction

Read & answer questions!

Activate Prior Knowledge (SQ)

Junior-high LD lessons adapted for direct instruction materials (All prior to reading)

Presentation on new vocabulary encountered in reading

Applications with the information

Independent practice with information

Performed better on multiple-choice tests than no training

K-W-L Strategy (SQ)

What do I know about the topic?

What do I want to know?

What did I learn?

Create worksheets with columns for each step

Self-Questioning (SQ)

What are you studying the passage for?

Find the main idea in paragraph & underline

Think of a question about the main idea

Learn the answer to your question

Look back at questions and answers to see if are provided more information (Wong & Jones, 1982)

Promotes recall & comprehension

Summarization/Main Idea (SQ)

Students: 8th & 9th LD (5-step strategy)

What are you studying the passage for?

Find the main idea in the paragraph and underline it/them.

Think of a question about the main idea you have underlined.

Learn the answer to your question.

Always look back at the questions and answers

*Enhanced: recall, idea unit identification, & factual recall than students receiving no training

Summarize & Paraphrase (SQ)

Read a passage or short segment from a book

Ask yourself who or what the passage is about

Ask yourself what was happening in the passage

Make up a summary sentence in your own words using the answers to the questions asked

Self-Monitoring & Attribution (SQ)

Teach students to find the main idea (Graves, 1986)

Direct instruction

(Main idea, Practice & feedback)

Direct instruction plus self-monitoring

(Stop twice & ask "Do I understand what the whole story is about?"& placed a check mark on a self-monitoring card. Reread passage if you can not answer question)

Control condition

Results: Outperformed both comparison conditions on passage main idea.

Elaborative Interrogation (SQ)

Coached students through reasoning processes (Anteaters!) (Scruggs et al., 1994; Scruggs et al., 1993; Sullivan, Mastropieri, & Scruggs, 1996)

Facilitate recall of text-based information by promoting active reasoning

Less effective performed independently facilitating recall & comprehension (Mastropieri, Scruggs, Hamilton, et al., 1996)

Higher in ability to explain recalled information

Text-Structure Based Strategies (SQ)

Teach strategies for different types of text

Main idea strategy (find & underline, write down in students own words, & study information

List strategy (find & underline topic of passage, write down topic/subtopic in students own words, study information

Order strategy sequential (find & underline main topic, write down what was different for each step in passage, & study information

MULTIPASS (SQ)

Similar to SQ3R (McCormick & Cooper, 1991)

Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review

Read material 3 times

Survey the materials

Size up material

Sort out material

Reciprocal Teaching (SQ)

Student assume role of teacher

Take lead in asking relevant text-related questions

Contains 4 comprehension-fostering strategies

Summarizing, Predicting, Questioning, & Clarifying

Acquire strategies instead of asking questions

Four reading strategies

Practice strategy with actual text

Support students develop strategies

Support each other during reading groups

*Participants were poor readers & not LD

POSSE Strategy (SQ)

Based on research in reciprocal teaching (Palincsar & Brown, 1984)

Students take turns leading class discussion & dialogue

Predicting ideas from prior knowledge

Organize predictions based on forthcoming text

Searching/summarizing for main idea

Evaluating reading comprehension

Story Grammar/Maps Sheets (SQ)

Map of setting, characters, time, & place

Problem in story

Goals in story

Outcomes of story

Training cards for independent readings

Improved responses to written comprehension questions

Reading Comprehension Guidelines