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Table of Contents
Definition
Comprehension strategy instruction gets used in the classroom as a research proven technique (Duke & Pearson to improve student understanding of texts. The process involves having students reflect on their use of specific strategies that good readers use when reading a text.
According to the National Reading Panel National Reading Panel directly teaching comprehension strategies leads to improvements in comprehension. These gains occur when taught in combination and used flexibly in active, naturalistic learning situations
History
The research into reading comprehension began in earnest in the late 1970's. The first taxonomies of reading comprehension skills got published by Barret and others. In 1978 John Flavell began to publish work on “thinking about thinking” or metacognition. At the same time Vygotsky's work got translated to English for the first time and the idea of activity and labor mediating language and learning began to enter the lexicon of educational research.
In 1984, bringing these threads together Palinscar and Brown began to publish work around Reciprocal Teaching,Reciprocal Teaching tried to identify common cognitive tasks that cut across all learning. Building off of work coming from sociocultural influences the intervention created a dialogue of strategy use between teacher and student.
These advancement also occurred at time the personal computer and networks entered the workforce and lead to cognitive scientists adopting a more information processing approach to comprehension approach. This lead to problem solving studies to influence reading comprhenesion strategy instruction. Expert studies combined with verbal protocol analysis lead to identification of what good readers do.
We teach comprehension strategy instruction to help students become active readers in control of their own comprehension.