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Reading Comprehension Strategy Makes Student Scream

Why did a student in a college Psychology course let out a loud scream of delight, leap out of her chair, run down the aisle and then give her professor a big hug? Read on for the rest of the story.

A friend of mine is a Professor of Psychology who is also helping his students to improve their reading comprehension. He gives tough exams and many of his students fail the tests unless they understand the concepts and principles.

Last semester he started advising a few students who were failing to read each chapter three times. He also advised these students to stop after reading each paragraph and explain it out loud to themselves. Instructions were not to go to the next paragraph until they could explain the meaning of the preceding one. This strategy was being offered to the students to help them become active readers in which they thoroughly engaged with the material for understanding and then through repetition stored the information in their long term memories.

Several students who used this strategy went from making “Fs” to making “As.” One of the students was so excited when she received her grade of “A” that she hollered out loud, bolted from her seat, ran down the aisle toward her professor and then gave him a big hug. Prior to this experience she was failing all of her college courses in spite of reading the chapters in her textbooks.

Now my friend has decided to conduct an experiment and do some action research to find out which of three different strategies will improve reading comprehension and test scores the most.

One group of students plans to read the chapters once before the next test, but will also pause after each paragraph and explain it out loud. They are not to go to the next paragraph until they understand the meaning of the preceding paragraph. Group 2 will read the chapters three times, but will not pause and explain the paragraphs. Group 3 will read each chapter three times and will also explain each paragraph three times.

Which of these three strategies will work best and in what order? Which group will make the highest scores? Which one will prove to be the most effective reading comprehension strategy? I will find out and will share the information with you in my next blog.

Copyright 2010. Raymond Gerson

Best regards,

Raymond Gerson

This entry was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 8:45 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.