Instructional Support Services
Herkimer-Fulton-Hamilton-Otsego BOCES
May 2023
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Content & Pedagogy
Getting Students Comfortable with Critical Thinking
Giving Retakes Their Best Chance to Improve Learning
Improving Students’ Real-Time Comprehension Strategies
In this Review of Educational Research article, Chunliang Yang, Wenbo Zhao, and
Liang Luo (Beijing Normal University), Bo Yuan (Ningbo University), and David Shanks (University College London) say that students around the world are “strikingly poor” at meta-comprehension – monitoring their understanding as they read texts and predicting what they will remember. This is a big problem for teachers because if students are overconfident about comprehension as they read, they won’t go back and re-read or ask questions to fill gaps and figure out what they don’t understand. The result: disappointing student achievement.
Yang and his colleagues did a meta-analysis to see what improves students’
meta-comprehension as they read several texts. The analysis identified several instructional approaches that significantly improve how well students monitor their own reading comprehension. Here are the strategies, listed in order of estimated effectiveness:
- Students write a summary after reading several texts (not after reading each one);
- Students sketch a concept map, diagram, and mind map as they read, or afterward;
- Students generate keywords capturing the gist of the texts after reading several;
- Students explain to themselves the new information contained in the texts;
- Students take practice tests and see what they thought they understood but didn’t;
- Students read texts with some letters deleted, forcing them to focus more on meaning;
- Students take a comprehension test that aligns with what they expected to be tested on;
- Students re-read the texts after a short delay.
There are two common factors in these strategies: (a) students actively engaging in
metacognitive activities as they read, and (b) students checking for understanding after a strategic delay (after they’d read all the texts). “In addition,” said the authors, “combining different interventions tends to produce additive benefits.” This meta-analysis also found that certain interventions were less effective at improving
meta-comprehension:
- Students write a summary of each text immediately after reading it;
- Student generating keywords immediately after reading each text;
- Students generating questions on the texts as they read each one, or after reading;
- Students reading texts that provided distracting analogies.
“Mind the Gap Between Comprehension and Metacomprehension: Meta-Analysis of
Metacomprehension Accuracy and Intervention Effectiveness” by Chunliang Yang, Wenbo Zhao, Liang Luo, Bo Yuan, and David Shanks in Review of Educational Research, April 2023 (Vol. 93, #2, pp. 143-194)