Yesterday I argued that the knowledge readers bring to a text is essential to reading comprehension. But does even a knowledgeable reader comprehend automatically? Mustn’t the reader apply comprehension strategies to extract meaning from the text? The short answer is that teaching students comprehension strategies does help, but too much time is currently devoted to them.
Reading comprehension strategies include things like question generation (students are taught to generate questions about a text and then answer them) comprehension monitoring (students are taught to become aware of when they do not understand), and summarization (students are taught techniques to summarize meaning). Often, multiple strategies are taught.
The National Reading Panel reviewed 205 studies examining the effectiveness of teaching students reading strategies, and there is little doubt that they help, and that the effect is sizable.
There are two aspects of the data which deserve special attention because they hold implications for classroom application. First, the effects of teaching students reading strategies are weak or absent before the third grade. This finding is readily understandable—students are still learning to decode, and simply can’t juggle in mind the tasks of decoding, comprehending, and trying to implement a strategy. It’s only when decoding has become fluid so that the reader doesn’t need to think about it much that enough mental space is free to accommodate a strategy.
Second, when it comes to teaching students to use reading strategies, shorter programs seem just as effective as longer programs. This finding is crucial, because it ought to make us think differently about what reading strategies actually do. It’s natural to think that strategies improve the reader’s skill in extracting meaning from a text. But if that were true then more practice ought to make you better at it. Instead, comprehension strategies feel less like a skill and more like a trick—something like “check your work” in mathematics. It’s a very smart thing to do, and students should be explicitly taught to do it, but it doesn’t require extensive practice.
What might the trick of comprehension strategies be? A good guess is that they encourage students to think differently about reading. There is so much emphasis on decoding in early reading instruction (as there must be) that it is understandable that a student might think “If I’ve decoded, then I’ve read it.” But an adult knows that if you get to the bottom of a page and don’t know what you’ve read, you haven’t really read it, even if you’ve decoded everything. That conception of reading—that the point is communication—must click for students, and comprehension strategies may have most of their impact in getting students to think about reading as something they do to understand. Once they understand that, most of what comprehension strategies advise is something that students will do naturally: try to find the main idea, check your own comprehension, and so on.
The bottom line is that teaching comprehension strategies is a good idea, but it appears to be a one-time boost. There is no evidence that more practice yields more benefit. More information on this subject can be found here: http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/winter06-07/CogSci.pdf
Dan,
Keep these posts coming. I discovered your website some weeks ago and am in the process of reading your articles.
For a long time I’ve been pondering what we might mean, and how we might teach, critical thinking. I haven’t made a whole lot of progress, but I have two rather general conclusions. First, critical thinking is taught by modeling, more than by explanation. Good teachers, in the course of their everyday teaching, give careful explanations, and that provides a model of critical thinking which students benefit from. And second, critical thinking is situation specific, or subject specific. In a particular school there might be a math department with enough good teachers that many students develop a substantial ability for critical thinking in math, while in that same school there might be a history department not so blessed, and critical thinking in history might be at a low level.
By this perspective critical thinking is simply a long term affect of consistent good teaching. Every thing you say about reading strategies, and their limitations fits into this perspective.
When reading your post a very good example of non-critical thinking came to mind. I’ve already written about it so I will just copy and paste from my article on my website:
My article, from which I take this quote, is on habits, mental habits in particular, which I think are extremely important to critical thinking, or its lack. Here’s a link: http://www.brianrude.com/Tchap12.htm
Comment by Brian Rude — August 28, 2008 @ 10:42 am
Brian, I agree that modeling is very important. I also think that explicit instruction in certain types of critical thinking is essential, for example, in science how to think about control and experimental groups. The example you give of the fifth grader is great one for vocabulary. . . I’ll bet you have others that key on the student’s knowledge. . .
Comment by Dan Willingham — August 28, 2008 @ 2:32 pm
Is there anything that influences how reflexively students use the strategies they have been taught? My daughter knows to check her work in math, but she tends not to bother…
Comment by Rachel — August 28, 2008 @ 7:28 pm
Rachel
there is much less research on this topic than on other aspects of reading strategies, but what has been done indicates that, yes, with enough practice the use of reading strategies can become automatic or reflexive. To my knowledge, the way to make it reflexive is (surprise, surprise) to practice it a lot.
Comment by Dan Willingham — August 29, 2008 @ 9:35 am
I just finished The Craftsman by Richard Sennett, and loved it.
I wonder what you think about his arguments. His vision of craft seems to be a perfect metaphor for teaching and his “collective craftsmanship” a model for schools. Sennett draws on the same studies on business organizations and social psychology as Richard Rothstein. For instance, he critiqued “Fordism” in the English National Health Service, and the primitive data-driven accountability which has largely failed in the last decade in a range of organizations. The implication is that those modern day “piece work” approaches run counter to our fundamental being. His twist is the distinction between “social expertise” and “anti-social expertise.” (Sennett might be appalled by my interpretation but his discussion could almost verbatim be an indictment of the Michelle Rhee’s vision of “a culture of accountability.”)
Sennett cites Kant’s “the Hand is the Window of the Mind,” and asserts that the “10,000 hour rule” applies to mastery of all sorts of crafts from music, woodworking, medical diagnosis, and basketball. He explores “domain shift” synthesizing cognitive research with Hesiod, Henry Petroski, and Levi Straus to explain why cell phones, the result of marrying radio with telephones would not have been possible “under the watchful eyes of boss-minders” but required cooperation, as well as the patience of glass blowers to put breakthroughs on the shelf until they meet their standards of quality. (sounds like delayed gratification to me)
I guess I should mostly ask you about Sennett’s interpretation of recent brain science, but if you are familiar with his work, I’d like to hear about his synthesis.
Comment by john thompson — August 31, 2008 @ 1:19 pm
My biggest beef with the “strategies” is that they become ends in themselves. It is not only that too much time is devoted to them. They are treated as the very reason for reading in the first place.
A teacher gives a mini-lesson on “inferencing” (awful verb). She then models it with a “read-aloud” and a “think-aloud.” (“Hmmm, why did Fern say that Wilbur was the capital of Pennsylvania? Maybe she was so deep in thought about Wilbur that she didn’t even hear the teacher’s question. I do that too, sometimes.”) Then the children read their own books and practice their own “inferencing.”
This is bizarre in two ways. First, there’s much, much more to discuss about Charlotte’s Web than the inference alone. It would make much more sense to teach the book, and have lessons and class discussion center around what was actually in it. It is a story about words, friendship, life and death; it has sharp satire and beautifully rhythmic passages. A mini-lesson on inferences does it no justice.
Second, inferences differ from each other in the degrees and kinds of knowledge and insight they require. There is no generic “inferencing.” At best, a student can learn to recognize when he or she doesn’t understand something, or when there is a gap of information in a text. But one can recognize those things and still not make a good inference.
So, Dan, I agree with you that some strategies are so straightforward that they should not take up much class time. Others are so nuanced that they can only be taught in context. And no strategy should overshadow the literature itself.
Comment by Diana Senechal — September 1, 2008 @ 2:38 pm
John
I’m afraid that I haven’t read that work & so can’t really comment on his view of brain science. What you describe certainly sounds interesting, and there is an enormous amount of research supporting the 10,000 hour (or ten year) rule. . .enough research that some exceptions have been discovered.
dan
Comment by Dan Willingham — September 1, 2008 @ 2:45 pm
As usual, Diana, you have found a terrific nugget of common sense. It *does* too often feel as if strategies are the reason we make children read. I think Dan’s point about a little instruction in reading strategies makes a great deal of sense. The practice comes–or ought to come–through rich, full discussions of great stories.
On a personal note, Diana, best of luck to you this week as you start teaching at a Core Knowledge school! Your students are lucky to have you, and we’re fortunate for the time and care you take in posting on this blog.
Comment by Robert Pondiscio — September 2, 2008 @ 9:37 am
Diana
Three cheers! I want my kids in any class you teach.
Dan
Comment by Dan Willingham — September 2, 2008 @ 2:06 pm
Thank you, Robert, for the good wishes! It is a wonderful school. As a result, I feel that I have a lot to learn! That is a good sign.
Comment by Diana Senechal — September 2, 2008 @ 8:29 pm
Teachers struggle with how to teach reading comprehension. The implicit-instruction teachers hope that reading a lot really will teach comprehension through some form of reading osmosis. The explicit-instruction teachers teach the skills that can be quantified, but ignore meaning-making as the true purpose of reading. Check out seven research-based reading comprehension strategies with multiple links at http://penningtonpublishing.com/blog/reading/how-to-teach-reading-comprehension/
Comment by Mark Pennington — September 26, 2009 @ 8:30 pm
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