The effects of using cognitive strategies on children’s reading comprehension
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What does this reveal about teaching reading comprehension?
The tests did not reveal any correlation between decoding skills (the ability to recognise words) and reading comprehension (understanding of a text). . This study shows that children with good decoding skills will not necessarily have good comprehension skills.
The 15-lesson intervention was much more successful than the 10-lesson intervention. This suggests that to improve children’s reading comprehension, a sustained programme of teaching the strategies is necessary. Evidence in the study suggested that although teaching pupils the strategies can take some time, once the pupils have the skills, they will continue to benefit from improved comprehension.
The study also found that the intervention gave better results for science classes than for history classes, suggesting a difference in the way children read for these subjects. The researcher suggests that a possible explanation for this is that the intervention in the history class was for only 10 lessons. The questions in the post-test were also about nature, and therefore different from the subject matter that the pupils had practised with in history.
The intervention was more successful in the class of 10-year-olds, than in the class of 12-year-olds. This led the researcher to suggest that the earlier the strategies are applied, the more likely they are to improve children’s reading comprehension skills. It was also suggested that some of the older children had already formed a negative self-image of their ability in reading comprehension, resulting in responses such as “This is only for the good children”.
The children with specific language impairment (SLI) were often quite tired after verbally processing the texts. To maintain the pupils’ concentration, dramatisations were used in some lessons. Reading strategies that have visual elements and use action methods have previously been shown to be successful with children who struggle with reading. The researcher suggests that a combination of reciprocal teaching and drama could be helpful for some classes, and that drawing illustrations could also help with comprehension.
Although generally pleased with the results, the researcher felt that the dialogue between the teachers and pupils, and amongst the pupils themselves, could have been more active. However, there was not enough time to improve this feature. Other studies have previously also observed teachers dealing with texts too quickly with the result that pupils were not being deeply enough engaged.
The researcher also commented that the lack of correlation between decoding skills and comprehension test scores suggests that pupils with weak decoding skills do not necessarily struggle with reading comprehension.
