Source: Adapted from Meyer et al., 1989; Meyer & Ray, 2011.

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      Research on knowledge and text structures highlighted and explored a reader’s response to a text, rather than meaning inherent in a text. Researchers commonly used metaphors such as reader as builder or reader as creator to describe this collaboration between reader and text.

       Comprehension Strategies: Reciprocal Teaching and Metacognition

      Many researchers during the cognitive revolution investigated the processes that readers use to make meaning (such as predicting, questioning, elaborating, inferring, clarifying, visualizing, retelling, or summarizing). They commonly referred to these processes as comprehension strategies. Initial research indicated that teaching students to use such strategies improved their comprehension of texts. Moreover, researchers attained even better results when they taught students to use combinations of strategies. The best-known and most-researched combination of strategies from this time is reciprocal teaching (Palincsar & Brown, 1984), in which a reader stops regularly while reading a text to engage in four strategies—(1) prediction, (2) questioning, (3) clarification, and (4) summarization—and selects those most appropriate to the comprehension challenges in the text.

      Researchers also delved into the metacognitive strategies that students use to monitor their comprehension while reading. These processes include:

      • Awareness—Paying attention to one’s thoughts

      • Monitoring—Recognizing when understanding breaks down

      • Control—Selecting a strategy to fix the problem

      • Evaluation—Judging how well one has resolved a problem and if further attention is necessary

      Pearson and Cervetti (2017) describe the genesis of metacognitive research as:

      A logical extension of the rapidly developing work on both schema theory and text analysis. These latter two traditions emphasized declarative knowledge, knowing that X or Y or Z is true, but were scant on specifying procedural knowledge, knowing how to engage a strategy for comprehension or memory. This is precisely the kind of knowledge that metacognitive research has emphasized. (p. 26)

      The primary metaphor that researchers used to refer to students’ use of metacognitive strategies when their comprehension breaks down was reader as fixer.

       Teaching Techniques: Gradual Release of Responsibility

      Researchers also sought to describe effective instructional techniques for teachers to use when teaching comprehension and metacognitive strategies. David Pearson and Margaret Gallagher (1983) proposed an explicit model, called gradual release of responsibility, which many educators still use today. In brief, it involves three phases.

      1. Teacher responsibility: The teacher explains the purpose of a strategy (or set of strategies), how to use it, and when to use it. Then, he or she models its use by thinking aloud, so that students are aware of what is going on in the teacher’s mind during reading.

      2. Shared responsibility: Students engage in guided practice while the teacher provides scaffolding and facilitation.

      3. Student responsibility: Students use the strategy or strategies independently.

      Many studies find that comprehension strategy instruction, using a gradual release of responsibility model (or similar approach), produces measurable gains in students’ reading comprehension (see Wilkinson & Son, 2011, for a review). Nevertheless, over the same time period, several notable studies indicated that teachers actually engaged in very little comprehension strategy instruction (for example, Durkin, 1978/1979). Why? Strategies instruction is difficult to learn and difficult to implement effectively. For example, Pamela Beard El-Dinary and Ted Schuder (1993) document the difficulties seven teachers experienced as they learned to implement transactional strategies instruction (a multiple-strategies approach similar to reciprocal teaching). By the end of the year, only two of the seven teachers were still committed to using the approach. More recent studies find similar results (Connor, Morrison, & Petrella, 2004; Hilden & Pressley, 2007; Klingner, Vaughn, Arguelles, Hughes, & Leftwich, 2004; Klingner, Vaughn, Hughes, & Arguelles, 1999; Mason, 2004; Pressley, Wharton-McDonald, Mistretta-Hampton, & Echevarria, 1998; Taylor, Pearson, Clark, & Walpole, 2000; Taylor, Pearson, Peterson, & Rodriguez, 2003, 2005). Pearson and Cervetti (2017) label these implementation challenges the Achilles heel of comprehension strategies instruction.

       From the 1990s to the Present: Reading Wars and the Common Core

      As the 20th century drew to a close, reading research continued to build on the foundation laid in the previous two decades, refining and adding nuance to create a philosophy of reading instruction that researchers often refer to as whole language. Kenneth S. Goodman and Yetta Goodman (1985) describe whole language as a “comprehension-centered pedagogy” in which “literacy—reading and writing—is regarded as a natural extension of human language development” (p. 2). Whole language builds on the previously articulated ideas of reader as builder, creator, and fixer of meaning but goes several steps further. In particular, whole language proponents advocate for consideration of context, incorporation of literature, and the addition of critical literacy. Table 1.3 (page 14) elaborates on these three emphases.

Table 1.3: Whole-Language Emphases