Comprehension Monitoring Strategies of College Reading Methods Students

Recent theoretical and applied research into metacognition has provided important pedagogical implications for improving reading comprehension skills, specifically through comprehension monitoring strategies. A promising breakthrough in reading comprehension methodology involves asking students how they came to know what they know and then directly teaching them comprehension monitoring strategies through teacher modeling techniques (Heller, 1986; Palinscar & Brown, 1984). Thus, an effective way to teach the concept of metacognition to college juniors and seniors is to involve them in a comprehension monitoring activity. This paper is about the results of a study in which 50 undergraduate reading methods students learned about and demonstrated the strategies that they used to construct the main idea of E.B. White's personal essay, "Education." Basic to the lesson described here is the idea that teacher modeling and concrete example-giving are important to all levels of instruction, kindergarten through university senior.